Chapter 3Jamesville-Dewitt

7th grade - 12th grade: DeWitt, New York

After my father retired from the Air Force, he went to Syracuse
University, both to teach and to work on a PhD. We moved to
103 Michaels Drive in the DeWitt suburb of Syracuse. The purchase
process was less clear than our previous home purchases, with a lot
more hunting around before settling on something. Perhaps this was
just because we had the luxury of having time to look and only living
about an hour away, unlike our previous moves from out of state where
my father had to start work right away.

The house was on a 1/4 acre lot which seemed small compared to our
previous 1 acre with pool in Rome and our 3-1/2 acres with tractor in
rural Maryland. However, my room was probably the largest I ever had
to myself, easily allowing me to have the usual two twin beds as well
as a wall of bookcases and still have my entire LEGO layout setup on
the floor. There was a green/blue shag carpet that worked well to
create a ocean around my LEGO island and very large and amusing green
and blue interwoven pattern that matched on the wall.

Although the yard was small, there was a lot of fruit growing. There
was an apple tree and a pear tree and the area below the back porch
was enclosed with a trellis on two sides covered with grape vines. In
my experience this was all more trouble that it was worth, especially
when you had to mow the grass. I'll note that a later owner seems to
have removed the fruit trees and put in an above grown pool instead.

The main room in the basement was only partially finished. The walls
had been paneled but the floor and ceiling where undone. We put down
a square tile linoleum floor and a drop acoustic tile ceiling,
although with square tiles, not the usual full rectangles. Our Seequa
Chameleon computer was down in this basement along with an upright
piano left by the previous owners. The wood stove from Maryland was
also put into use in the basement.

While looking for this house we had seen a similar one that had access
from the garage to the basement that my father had really
liked. Eventually my father got around to putting one in himself. We
rented a concrete cutter and cut a whole in the floor of the garage
and dug out room for stairs and opened up an entry into unfinished
back basement area that contained the furnace and water heater. As
often the case with out house projects, it was finished soon before we
moved out. The main use of the stairs was removing the upright piano
out of the basement when we got rid of it.

Jamesville-DeWitt Middle School (1985-1987)

I actually started at
the J-D Middle
School about a week before moving into the house on Michaels
Drive. It was an hour drive each way from our old house Rome which
fortunately did not last long.

The current Jamesville-DeWitt Middle School
Family
Handbook has a nice map of the building on page 10 which I used to
find the room numbers for the various teachers below. Note that
the Kim P listed in the handbook under Visual Arts is none other that
the Kim K mentioned below.

7th Grade (1985-1986)

I met Donna C and Dave H my first day, as they were other new 7th
grade students in House II. Dave and I were both dumped into second
year Spanish without any prior experience, diving right into
conjugating "gustar" and "querer" without even
basic vocabulary for basics like colors.

Some other people I met early on were Samantha M and her younger
brother Ben who lived at the top of my street. Even though Samantha
and I were both in the same grade, we never really crossed paths much
at school. She was in House III and I was in House II. She took French
and I took Spanish. Later on in high school when we would be in
classes together, but I ended up friends with Rebecca D who was a bit
of a rival of Samantha's. We did have one mutual friend, Stephen S, so
I hear about her periodically. Perhaps in a different life we would
have been closer friends, I hear she ended up living in Cambridge, MA,
married to an MIT graduate.

Coming to J-D ended my youth soccer experience. I had played in various
youth groups from 2nd grade to 6th grade but when I showed up to J-D
there were tryouts, something I just didn't have any experience
with. I walked out onto the field not knowing what I was doing,
probably having missed the first day or two because of moving from
Rome, getting shouted at by the not so friendly Coach Shipley. It just
seemed to turn something fun into something that was just
unpleasant. It didn't help that the tryouts were while I was still
commuting from Rome, making for a very long day. So I bailed on the
whole thing, not even sticking around long enough to see if I would
make the cut. Looking back this was probably a big mistake, I missed
out most of the organized team sports experience in school, although
in high school I did indoor track one winter and often played weekly
pickup games of Ultimate Frisbee.

After 6th grade with Mr. Troutman for all my subjects, it was nice to
go back to rotating to different teachers throughout the day. For
each grade in a given house, there were four teachers for four
academic subjects which all the kids in that grade in that house would
rotate through.

For 7th grade social studies in House II we had
Mrs. Schleicher (room 202). I also had her for homeroom and study
hall. I used to get into mild trouble with Rich S in study hall on
occasion, but in general Mrs. Schleicher was very nice.

For English we had Mrs. Culhane (room 203). She was a little less
friendly that Mrs Schleicher, although I often didn't get along
English teachers since I never really knew what they were looking for.
I
reread The
Light in the Forest, which I had previously read after receiving
it as a gift from my Aunt Martha. However, even reading it twice
couldn't give me enough insight to satisfy Mrs. Culhane's expectations
to receive an "A". We also
read Cheaper
by the Dozen, which at least appealed to the nerd in me.

We had Mr. Ramsden (room 205) for math, he was a pretty strict
disciplinarian. He went on to be principal at the middle school,
including when my sister attended before moving to Concord, MA.

For science we had Mr. Spofford (room 212), who was sort of a goofy
guy, certainly a fun teacher. He had the joy of teaching a bunch of
co-ed middle school students about sexual reproduction. The House II
guidance counselor was Mr. Erwin (room 213), although had a few brief
meetings with him, I guess I just wasn't a enough of a problem child
to get much attention. It's still not entirely clear to me what
guidance counselor's, especially middle school ones, do on a daily
basis, but I probably don't want to know.

We ventured outside of House II for our other subjects. All of the
foreign languages were in House I along with the fifth graders (since
then a new House 4 has been built for the fifth graders as school
enrollment has increased). I had Miss Pierce for Spanish (room
102?). My Spanish name for class was Benito. Stephen S was Esteban. Of
course, David H was simply David, although pronounced with an
accent. Miss Pierce loved giving and grading worksheets. I had
convinced my mom to give me a quarter for each A I received, and Miss
Pierce became a large source of my income. I learning Spanish words
for family with the help of Paco and how to make guacamole from
avocados to learning cooking terms, although I never really liked the
stuff until I moved to California. When I ended up traveling to Spain,
I made my parents take me to see
the Segoviaaqueduct
that was on the cover of my middle school Spanish book. I also got to
experience the New Years Eve in
the Plaza
Mayor of Madrid, something else I learned to thanks to Miss
Pierce. (I just learned in January 2009 that the now Mrs. Barbara
Pierce Marshall was a member of
the J-D class of
1961.)

Back in those days, there was an expectation that schools have art and
music programs. For art, we had Mrs. Homan (room 24 and 25). She made a
trip to the Mt Everest base camp and we watched a presentation of her
slides, perhaps in the large group room (room 18). For music we had
Mr. Sipley (room 16), who was almost as intimidating as a music
teacher as he had been during soccer try outs. Class activities
included such oddities as listening to a piece of classical music and
being asked to identify the instruments, not that we had any
preparation listing to the individually ahead of time. Perhaps this
had been taught to people in fifth or sixth grade, but I wasn't the
only one to have trouble with this. We also did some simple music
appreciation, putting names and some history to such pieces as
as Flight
of the Bumblebee.

All boys and girls were required to take both shop and home
economics. For shop we had Mr. Horan (room 9) and we made clocks. I
know Stephen recently recalled to me in late 2008 how good these
clocks came out, they were just as nice as a Bulova clock I received
as a wedding present. I tried to make mine have a built in radio,
which hadn't worked out so well, but Stephen did a nice one with a
pendulum. In seventh grade home economics Miss Pierson (room 15)
taught us how to sew. I made a small navy blue duffel bag which I
could attach to my bicycle with a Velcro handle closure. I used for
paper payment collection. Starting in college, I used to store my
soldering supplies. We also had a technology class which was located
next to shop, led more than taught by Mr. Wells (room 8). It pretty
much up to us what we did. The most memorable thing we did was making
an episode of
Divorce Court. It had been recently revived as a popular TV show
in 1985. Every student got involved. We had actors to play the couple,
judge, witnesses, bailiff, etc. We created a set. We wrote a script
and had rehearsals. We video taped the performance. That said, I have
forgotten what my role was, although Amy K played a major role in the
production.

Work

Soon after moving to DeWitt I started working again as a paper boy,
working for the local distributor Mrs. Jordan. I did a short route
that included my street, Michaels Drive, as well as Eden Roc Circle,
and the first block of Ardsley Drive. I delivered the Syracuse
Herald-Journal in the afternoon Monday through Saturday as well as
the Sunday morning paper, the Herald American. The route was not flat
like in Rome, so I took to walking more than riding my bike.

I bought a Realistic Pocketvision 3 handheld 2.7" LCD TV from
Radio Shack
(catalog
number 16-153) when the price dropped to $99 that I tried watching
cartoons on it while walking around doing deliveries without too much
success. Both the TV and the NES are still around and working,
although poor R.O.B. is missing a part from one of his hands.

Syracuse University basketball
coach Jim
Boeheim lived on Eden Roc at the time I was paperboy. Usually I
when I went to collect payment I would see his then wife Elaine,
occasionally with their daughter Elizabeth. They one of the better
tippers on the route, giving me 50 cents instead of the usual quarter
that other people would give me. During this time when he lost the
1987 NCAA Championship Game due to a last second basket by Indiana
University. It was felt a little awkward delivering the paper the day
after that with the cover story of his loss.

Some other memorable people on my paper route included the O'Briens
across the street whose wife was a town councilwoman, the town council
women across the street, the couple without kids whose husband was the
ski instructor at Labrador, the guy across the street from them that
hunted and frequently had dead deer around, the woman with a Corvette
who worked nights and was never around to pay, Mike D's family next to
her, the young family with the baby, Mrs. Haas who was a J-D music
teacher, the family that yelled at me for walking on the grass to go
between houses but yet still wanted the paper delivered to their door,
and the people next store to them with the big flag pole and old, loud
German shepherd.

In 2008 I learned that this paper route was taken over by my friend
Adam G and his brother Josh when I moved to Woodside road. Its amazing
to find out after over 20 years! It was interesting to swap stories
about my old customers and hear about how that baby grew up.

I occasionally did yard work for some of my neighbors on my paper
route, mostly just raking leaves for some of the elderly single
women. One of these neighbors was the lady next door on Eden Roc. One
day she locked herself out. However, an upstairs window was open so my
dad got the extension ladder out and for whatever reason I was sent up
the ladder to open the front door for her. How is that for customer
service?

Friends

One of my closest friends in middle school was Jason D. We often hung
out at his house on Butternut Drive over by Shoppingtown Mall, playing
games, even talking about girls. He also had an NES so we used to play
together, a particular favorite
being
Pro Wrestling. We were in a few classes together, I sat next to
him in the back of Mr. Ramsden's 7th grade math class behind Megan
H. Unfortunately we grew apart in high school when Jason dropped out
of the honors track and avoided nerdy extracurricular activities.

Another middle school friend was Richard S who lived on Kittell Road
near the old Waldenbooks and Track and Racquet club, where Rich did in fact play
racquetball. We had a bunch of mutual interests including computers,
chess, rockets, and airplanes. He was a Tandy Color Computer hacker, I
think he had a CoCo 2. He wrote a pretty cool side scrolling graphics
demo before there was Commander Keen on the PC. Rich and I used to
play chess at school, which almost always ended up with him beating me
handily. He came with me when I first launched my model rockets off in
an old quarry off Nottingham Road, which now seems to be full of
houses. We grew apart in high school, for similar reasons as with
Jason, but we occasional had classes together. I particularly remember
sitting behind him and Mike V in Mrs. Quinn's biology class junior
year and I think we took some of Mr. Jerald's computer classes as
well, and perhaps some architectural or mechanical drawing.

The suburb of DeWitt had a large Jewish community, with at least three
temples I recall attending on various occasions and there were
certainly others as well. Of course being 7th and 8th grade, this
meant one thing: bar mitzvahs. Being the new kid, I missed out on most
of these, the first one I was invited too was for fellow House II
classmate David G. I was quite excited to go, having heard about the
goings on at the sometime outlandish receptions and having seen people
wearing bar mitzvah t-shirts, often styled like rock tour t-shirts,
with the names of the guests replacing the list of cities. Talk about
adding to middle school social pressure, in-lists were printed on
shirts that were warn around school.

David's bar mitzvah began with the service at the temple which
included the traditional elements such as the reading of the Torah and
was immediately followed by a small social reception. Then later in
the day, there was larger sit-down dinner reception, similar in scale
to a wedding reception. there was a large head table with two rows for
seating all of David's peers. After dinner there was a DJ and
dancing. I hung out with Richard S and Amy K during the dancing. I was
friends with Amy after this, often talking with her outside her locker
in House II, probably the first girl I would have considered a friend
during these awkward middle school years.

Another friend was was Ariel B. He lived on Jamar Drive near Richard
S, I think they were neighborhood friends because of that, not sure
but I'm guessing I probably met one via the other, just not sure which
way. Ariel was a funny man which often got him into mild trouble. I
went to Ariel's bar mitzvah as well and we remained friends into high
school, when I actually moved closer to his neighborhood.

Stephen S is a life long friend from my middle school days. My parents
had looked at buying the house next to him on Terese Terrace when we
were moving to DeWitt. We lived close enough together that we could
get to each others houses without much difficulty, although avoiding
the main roads required some cutting through one undeveloped areas and
made using bicycles troublesome. He liked to come help me smash up my
LEGO city using a weapon devised of the 6
large Techic tires
from my LEGO sets #952 Farm
Tractor and #8860 Car
Chassis. We also played a lot of NES,
especially Russ'n
Attack. After I inherited some model rockets from my cousin
Richard C, Stephen and I used to launch them off without adult
supervision at the middle school. While experimenting with different
launch angles to compensate for wind, we ended up turning a couple
rockets into dangerous projectiles. One was a space shuttle model that
traveled almost level a great distance across the field and the other
was a simple but large diameter rocket that ended up in the brush east
of the school. We had sleep overs at my house where secret crushes
were revealed under the pretext of "if you had to pick a girl
to marry". Although I moved out of the neighborhood in high school, we
remained close friends and Stephen was a groomsmen at
my wedding. I now try to
see him whenever I'm down in Los Angeles. By the way, that house my
family at looked at next door to Stephen belonged to Ross Y's family,
a close friend of Stephen and David G, and I later cross paths with
Ross at MIT.

Two other friends from middle school were Peter E and David Y. Its
hard to talk about them separately because they had apparently been
friends since Kindergarten. Some twist of fate apparently tried to
test this friendship by putting Peter in House II and Dave in House
III, so where I saw them together was at lunch, usually with another
friend of theirs, Eric P and I think Chris S, a friend of
Eric's. Peter and Dave did go separate paths at college, and I've
stayed in better touch with Dave, visiting him in college at
Dartmouth, at medical school in Syracuse, and now as doctor in
Bakersfield. I have be glad to see Peter as well, once when he was at
Stanford GSB, at Dave's wedding, and most surprising to me at the J-D
Class of 1995 10 year reunion.

One person I could have been nicer to was Gigi T. She road my school
bus home in the afternoons headed to a house on Jamesville Road. She
wrote me a note revealing some feelings for me and gave it to me on
the bus where someone else saw it. I was embarrassed for no other
reason that I was a twelve year old boy. I made a pretty public
statement on the spot stating that I did not like her. I've forgotten
the details, but I'm sure I could have been nicer.

One time my friend Brian G from Rome came and visited. His father was
a lawyer and was over in Syracuse for business. In the evening, we
took my old dad's old telescope up Hamilton Parkway to vacant lot just
on the left on Westerly Terrace, a place where I used to cut over to
Stephen S's house on Terese Terrace. Troopy came with us, off leash as
usual. Unfortunately, when we were heading down from the vacant lot,
Troopy got a head of us, running out onto Westerly and a car coming on
Westerly literally ran over her. There was a loud yelp. The car slowed
down but kept moving and drove away. Remarkably Troopy had
survived. She was a small dog and had not been hit by a wheel, but was
knocked down and passed under the car. She was in pain, particulally
on one side where I guess she may have broken a rib, but she wasn't
bleeding. Brian and I took her home but I never told my parents. At
the time, I figured they would blame me for Troopy running out in the
street, although the only time we ever leashed her when taking her to
the vet or in and out of the car or RV when we were traveling. In
retrospect, it seems silly to have hidden it from my parents, I don't
think they would have gotten angry with me. I'm pretty sure I pointed
out the soreness to my parents, disavowing all knowledge of how it
happened. They decided not to take her to the vet and fortunately
Troopy recovered and was with us for many more years.

Activities

Another investment of my paper route money was my
Deluxe Set which
included R.O.B., the
Robot Operating Buddy to play the included Gyromite and, more
importantly, the Zapper gun to play the included Duck Hunt. I carried
the huge deluxe set box back from the KB toy store in Shoppingtown
Mall on my bicycle. I had a number of the other launch titles such as
10 Yard Fight, Excitebike, Ice Climber, and Kung Fu as well as many
other games. One Christmas in the Michaels Drive house I found where
my mom hid two NES games she was going to give me. I deviously swapped
the cartridges out with some older games and played Balloon Hunt this
way long before Christmas. I was a bit paranoid my mom would notice so
I turned off the game if she ever came around when I happened to be
playing. The NES is currently hooked up to my basement TV for a little
retro gaming. Unfortunately poor R.O.B. is missing a part from one of
his hands making Gyromite unplayable. I'm also missing my Zapper gun
and a few games, probably in the possession of my high school neighbor
Alok G. I still have a few games that don't belong to me, presumably
as collateral from Alok.

I was briefly into playing chess in middle school. I signed up for a
chess class after school, I believe Rich S was also in it. I got the
Radio Shack Computerized Portable Sensory Chess
(catalog
number 60-2187) set and used to use that to practice by myself. Rich S
and I tried to use it to play chess during Mrs. Schleicher's 7th grade
study hall a few times, but in the end she frowned on us using
it. Later, in eight grade, I made a two sided game board of my own
unique design with knock hockey on one side and a white and gray tiled
chess board on the other.

I did start spending a lot more time skiing in DeWitt. I went
frequently to
Labrador starting in 7th
grade. Their head ski instructor was on my paper route (neighbor of
Jim Boeheim actually), and he would ski with me occasional and give me
some tips beyond my lessons. In 8th grade I got a Saturday season pass
and I think this is when my dad started skiing as well, giving me some
regular company on the chair lift.

Although I spent some time using our Seequa Chameleon down in the
basement, including playing the original, non-id Software
Castle
Wolfenstein game, I also spent time with my father down at the
Syracuse University computer lab, which had a lot more variety of
computer to play with. There was an IBM PC XT with a hard disk that I
used for Turbo Pascal. There was also a strange IBM PC AT with an
APL
keyboard. My dad was there to use a Symbolics Lisp machine and let me
play with the similar TI Explorer Lisp machines, where I first first
learned to car and
cdr.

There was a hobby shop at the end of Jamesville Road in the same strip
mall next to the Carvel Ice Cream store. It was a quick ride from the
house and I would often waste my paper route money there. I ended up
with quite a fleet of model rockets, many of them purchased at that
store, although I'm guessing the Estes Aerospace Club model was
Richard C.

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster

The Space
Shuttle Challenger disaster happened on 28 January 1986 when I was
in seventh grade. It is supposed to be one of those reference points
for people like the JFK assassination, with people asking, "Where were
you when you found out?" I was in Mrs. Culhane's English class. Someone
must have come in because we found out in the middle of the
period. That day in class we were doing some activity in small groups,
as opposed to in the more usual lecture format, so it both let the
news spread quickly since we were allowed to be talking, but at the
same time masked the source of the news because most of us never saw
the door open and someone come in. The next class I had was
Mr. Ramsden's math class. Mr. Ramsden had brought out a small radio
and we sat and solemnly listened to a news report about the disaster.

As a kid I had always been a big NASA junkie. Although the Apollo
program was over before I was born, I was very aware that
the Apollo 11
landing was on the same date as my birthday, as well as that the
Viking 1 Mars
lander, which landed on my third birthday. One of my favorite
pre-school books
was SkyLab
- America's First Space Station, which was a Hallmark pop-up
book. I watched the first space shuttle launch from home and then
watched many of next ones along with the rest of my classmates at
Mount Harmony Elementary School. I had been at Dulles International
Airport to see the arrival of the Space Shuttle Enterprise. NASA had
such a string of successes that such a catastrophic failure was
unthinkable. It was especially troubling when reports came out that
Morton Thiokol had overruled engineers concerns about the effect of
that mornings sub-freezing temperatures on the O-rings of the solid
rocket boosters. I vividly remember my own father, an US Air Force
colonel at the time and former pilot, telling me at breakfast that
they would never launch that day given the amount of ice that was
visible even to those of us watching morning news programs. Apparently
the shuttle Rockwell engineers had similar reservations, but Rockwell
managers downplayed these concerns to NASA. Regardless of the cause of
the disaster, it would be nearly three years before any more shuttle
flights, a huge blow to the US manned space program.

Summer 1986

One of my favorite childhood memories was visiting the original, and
at the time
only, LEGOLAND in
Billund, Denmark. I found a receipt in my souvenir guidebook that
dates this to 9 August 1986. I burned through lots of film trying to
take pictures of everything in Miniland. My favorite two scenes were
the space shuttle at the launch pad atop
its mobile
launcher platform and the canal with working locks and boat
traffic. At the gift shop I decided to buy Technic LEGO something I
hadn't seen in the states, namely
the #8851 Excavator, which
included a pneumatic system for moving the excavator's arm. At
thirteen years of age, this would be my last LEGO set for a long time,
probably until I bought myself
the #8880 Super Car set
after college in California. I never ended up using any of the
excavator's parts in any of my later high school projects so it
remains assembled to this day, now residing with my foreign travel
souvenirs in my bedroom.

8th Grade (1986-1987)

For social studies we had Mr. Sorkin (room 203), a large man that was
very passionate about history. Later on in high school I would have
his relatively tiny wife Mrs. Sorkin for Spanish. Both were great
teachers, but it was hard to imagine the two of them as a couple.

For English we had Mrs. Renee Solow (room 209). She was one of my two
favorite English teachers, perhaps just because I seemed to understand
what she was looking for in her assignments. I got an A+ on a poem I
wrote entitled "Dinner" but I liked another poem I wrote entitled "The
Nomad" better.

Dinner

Hey Mom, what are we having for dinner?
Whatever it is, I hope it's a winner.

Possibly sweet and sour pork over rice?
How about chicken with Cajun spice?
How about some spiced hams,
and a side of boiled yams?

How about basic meet and potatoes,
or possibly even bacon, lettuce, and tomato.
And for dessert while we're watching MASH,
we could have some Heavenly Hash!

What did you say we're having for dinner?
You say we're having chopper liver!
Suddenly I lost my appetite.
(Actually I think I'll go out and grab a bite!)

The Nomad

Every calls me the Nomad,
Because of all the paces I go,
From Bonn to Bangkok to Baghdad,
From desert to eternal snow.

I have been many places,
Where some people act peculiar,
They say we have the same faces,
How come that sounds familiar?

But if my heart should ever yearn,
I just get my harmonica,
And play a song that I once heard,
About my own America.

The poetry unit was suprisingly fun, she even put
together a collection of the poems. Another
student, Jim P, won second prize in the Herald-Journal Poetry Contest
for his poem "Teenage Tango". Although I ended up hating most books I
was forced to read on a classes schedule, some how she didn't ruin "To
Kill a Mockingbird" for me. I got an A on my paper about the book,
even though it wasn't too far of some stuff in found in the Cliff
Notes. Unfortunately, Mrs. Solow was diagnosed with breast cancer
while we were students. It did go into remission, but for most of the
year we ended up with a substitute, Mrs. Carlson, who was mom of a J-D
student and lived over on Maple Drive, as I would sometimes see her
driving near our Woodside Road house. The substitute was a good
teacher as well, but it would have been nice to have Mrs. Solow all
year.

For math we had Mr. Chengerian (room 208) who in the honors class
taught us 8th graders the NYS Regents Course I material meant for 9th
graders. Mr. Chengerian came from a family of award winning Christmas
tree farmers and I would often seen prize winning Chengerian trees at
the New York State Fair. I often wonder if he ended up retiring to
Chengerian's Tree Land.

For science we had Mr. Esslinger (room 201) who was a little more
quiet and reserved that Mr. Spofford had been. Perhaps he had to be
more serious because we actually were playing with fire. We melted and
burned things with our Bunsen burners, mostly just melting the zinc
out of pennies and burning magnesium, but one girl managed to light
her big 80's hair on fire. We also used electrolysis to separate
hydrogen and oxygen in water, after which we lit the hydrogen with a
match. Hydrogen power here we come!

For Spanish, I once again had Miss Pierce. However, this time I was
bumped to the honors class which would allow me to skip freshmen
Spanish in high school if I could do well enough. Not bad progress
after missing the sixth grade year of Spanish the other kids had,
although I still think I've always been weak on my Spanish vocab
because of missing that first year.

For art in eight grade we had a young student teacher,
Mr. Jazinski. For music, we had more of Mr. Sipley. It wasn't too long
after this that he ran off with another teacher to Texas, leaving two
surprised spouses behind.

For home economics, Miss Metosh (room 17) both tried to teach us
cooking and life skills. All that stuff about balancing checkbooks was
fine and all, but the real fun was learning to make candy. I actually
continued making the hard candy recipe I learned through out high
school. Probably the more important thing I learned from her is that
it is actually a good idea to clean the sink after you are done in the
kitchen. In 8th grade shop we have us a little more latitude on
picking our own projects. One of his suggestions was a knock hockey
table which I customized with a chess board on the back. My mom took
me down to a tile shop on Erie Boulevard to get the white and gray I
used. I have hope this woodworking masterpiece still survives in my
parent's house. We didn't do anything too exciting this year in Mr
Wells technology class, probably because we were doing computer stuff,
which wasn't that novel to me. We did have lots of fun playing
Where
in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, which was arguably educational.

All the students in Mr. Chengerian's eighth grade honors math class
participated in an New York Mathematics League math contest. I received
a "Superior Achievement" certificate, probably because I was
one of the top people in our school, which led me to be interested in
math team in high school. One math award I would not be getting was
admittance in to the "300 Club" for people who received 100% on all
three math regents exams. I blew it my first year getting a 98% on the
Course I regents. Mr. Chengerian reassured me saying that at least
this took the pressure off subsequent years. I went on to get 98%
every year on the regents. The only one I ever aced was Earth Science.
I also took the SATs in middle school in order to qualify for the CTY
summer program even though I did not go until after freshmen year of
high school.

Middle school brought my first serious crush, a House II girl that I
knew from class. A few of my more trustworthy friends such as Jason
and Stephen knew about the crush but I was too afraid to ever really
plan on acting on it. I mean I did talk to the girl in school and she
even talked back, so this wasn't just some nerd pining after some cute
girl that didn't even know his name, just some nerd pining after
someone who would at least acknowledge his existence. One evening
Jason and I went to see a musical at the high school, although I'm
pretty sure it was the middle school musical production. Jason and I
ran into the girl there and the three of us ended up sitting together
near the back of the auditorium. I thought the girl and I were getting
on pretty well, perhaps she just was laughing at my jokes or
something. During intermission I concocted a plan that perhaps only
makes sense to the mind of a thirteen year old. During the second act,
I would leave to go to the bathroom. Jason would reveal my
infatuation, pretending that I didn't know he was going to do
this. After I returned, Jason would signal me positively or negatively
if I should make a move. Well, I returned, the signal was negative,
and the second act was awfully quiet. The girl was a little more
distant in school for the remainder of the year, or perhaps I was just
a little more distant myself. It even took me some courage to ask her
to sign my yearbook, but she did, unfortunately noting in it that she
"only liked me as a friend". Eventually the two of us did
become friends again in high school, although we never spoke of that
night throughout during our high school years. However as our senior
year was wrapping up I must have mentioned the old story to her
because in my senior yearbook she says she didn't remember that she
"totally crushed my life" in middle school!

Summer 1987

In the summer of 1987 my father did something relatively impulsive and
bought a used RV. We set out on the road the very next day to Seattle,
Washington. My friend Stephen filled in for me on my paper route
during this long trip, as he often did when I was on vacation.

In Montana, we saw the family of one of my mom's cousins living south
of Butte. Although we had tried calling them, we talked to them ahead
of time about our visit. We weren't able to find their ranch when we
arrived and it was starting to get dark. My dad had the good idea to
ask in a local bar and sure enough someone was able to tell us where
they were. We tracked down the location of their house that night but
waited to drop in on them until the next day. It turned out that we
never were able to reach them because the telephone lines only reached
the corner of their ranch property, not to their house. I was housed
in a shed of some kind and there was an answering machine on the
line. My mom was not one to leave messages on answering machines, but
even if she did, it was not so frequently checked that they knew we
were coming. So we surprised them in our RV that morning. My mom's
cousin was actually back east working building houses on Cape Cod, but
we had a good time visiting with his wife and many kids out on the
range.

Driving west from Montana, we crossed Idaho on I-90, winding down the
mountains into eastern Washington. We got off the interstate and
stopped to
see Grand
Coulee Dam, after which we continued on to Seattle for the
conference.

After the conference, we drove south toward San Francisco. We visited
Mount St. Helens, just seven years after its major eruption. Many
areas surrounding the volcano still seemed totally devastated. For
example, there were still hillsides that consisted of just knocked
down trees in ash. Much of the touring was in our RV on very narrow
dirt and gravel roads which weren't very wide and had no guard tales.
Sometimes it was a little frightening being in the passenger seat and
fearing the front wheel was going to go off the edge. This was made
worse when we volunteered to push another vehicle that had stopped
working, since often we would move to one side or another to try to
nudge the powerless vehicle to stay on the road itself. In the end we
survived the winding exploration of the volcano, marked only with a
gray coating of ash on the RV picked up from the unpaved roads.

On the way though northern California we spent some time driving the
RV on the winding curves of CA-1 where I recall seeing a beautiful
sunset. I believe we stopped at Muir Woods and also explored the hills
above the Golden Gate bridge. In San Francisco, we parallel parked the
RV in front of a Wendy's on North Point just above Ghiradelli Square,
after which we walked down Polk to Beach and went down to see the
cable car turn around there. We walked through Fisherman's Wharf to
Pier 39. We also took the RV up to Coit Tower but it was prohibited on
the infamously
crooked Lombard
Street so I walked down. We spent the night
on Treasure
Island naval based where I woke up to celebrate my fourteenth
birthday. We took I-80 east out of town visiting a Vacaville house
where my dad had lived when stationed at
nearby Travis
AFBafter graduation from the Air Force Academy.

Further down I-80, we crossed
the Great
Salt Lake Desert. There was a point where our Rand-McNally atlas
said there was 68 miles between exits and since our RV could only get
about 200 miles per tank, I made sure we refueled before heading out
since who wants to walk across a desert with an gas can?

From Salt Lake, we headed to a series of national parks and
monuments. The first
was Dinosaur
National Monument along with a trip to Dinosaur, Colorado, so I
could check Colorado off my list of visited states, which was my only
visit to Colorado until I returned with Jennifer after we were
married. From there saw
the Grand
Tetons on our way
to Yellowstone.
On the way in to Yellowstone we stopped the RV to see a moose
surrounded being stalked by many tourists. Later after
seeing Old
Faithful we were driving out in the dark and came around a corner
to find a parade of Bison crossing the road in front of us, a true
Yellowstone experience. After Yellowstone we traveled to
the Black Hills
of South Dakota where we saw Custer State
Park, Mount
Rushmore, and
the Crazy
Horse Memorial. We also saw
the Badlands
on our way east from the Black Hills.

For such a long trip, there is a lot of miles where there is not much
I recall specifically. We did stop and see many family friends and
relatives both ways, but since we took many road trips, its hard for me
to be sure who we saw on this trip. I know we took a ferry across Lake
Michigan once, and I know we took the RV on a ferry at least once, but
I'm not sure if those where the same even and on this trip or on a
later trip to we made to Minnesota. We might have visited our family
friends the M
in Puce,
Ontario, as we did on at least two summers, one of which was in
1989 for sure, but the other times I'm not so sure of.

Other middle school memories

I went to the Erie Canal
Museum in Syracuse with my family when my Uncle Fred was in
town. Going to a canal museum with no actually canal was a little
disappointing compared to the
Erie Canal Village that
I had been to in Rome, NY. It was like going to a train museum in an
old train station without real engines and cards.

Jamesville-DeWitt High School

Just before I started high school, we moved to a new house
at 5009
Woodside Road. It was conveniently located a half mile from
the J-D High
School although that wasn't the primary goal in moving there. The
Woodside Road house was pretty similar to the house we had in Rome,
having a ranch style layout with the main living areas and bedrooms on
the main floor, but also with a full size basement, although the
basement was not finished like it was in Rome, although there was a
fireplace in the basement for our wood stove. It also was on an acre
lot like the Rome house, although without the pool that made Rome so
cool. The driveway had a parking area on the left side where we kept
the RV. There was a shed in the back left corner of the lot under a
big willow tree where we kept the Opel (or was it the Plymouth
Horizon?) until we finally got rid of it. The tractor was kept on the
flat bed on the right side of the house. We installed our old
basketball pole in the corner where the parking area met the main
drive. My room was smaller than it had been on Michaels drive so a lot
of things had to stay in boxes in the basement, and as I was going
into high school, LEGO city was finally put away, not to see the light
of day again until 2008.

My father never semed to tire of house projects. One project on the
inside was installing a spiral staircase. We actually got the stair
case from a company, The Iron
Shop, that I frequently had seen advertised in Popular
Mechanics. Before installing the stair case, the only way to reach the
basement was through concrete steps that were outside the kitchen
door, basically in the garage. He added the new staircase in a former
closet to the left of the living room fireplace. This allowed access
to the stair case from the living room or the den which had been on
the other side of the closet. However, when we moved out he took it
all out and put it back as it had been before. We had used it for easy
access to the basement fireplace where the wood stove was installed.

In another project, he added a door from the bottom of the stairs to
the basement to the backyard. This involved digging out the back yard
surrounding the door to enable access to the lower level, not unlike
the Arlington driveway project, but on a much smaller scale. He also
ended up replacing the septic tank drain field in the back yard not
that far away from the doorway project.

The RV was a new source of projects as well. My father rebuilt the
engine and I was very impressed when it started again the first time
he tried it. He also decided he wanted to be able to park the RV in
the garage. The plan was to add a second garage door to the back of
the garage. In order to accommodate the height of the RV, he would
both lower the floor, angling it down toward the and raise the
roofline on the back of the garage. Although I spent some quality time
with a sledgehammer breaking up the old floor, I don't know what
became of this project because I went off to college before it was
completed and the house was sold while I was away at school.

My father and I built our own computer desk for the den in this new
house. It wasn't that fancy a design, but the main work area was wide
enough for two large computers to be side by side. We used kitchen
cutting board material so it would be durable. It had a shelf below
for holding the tractor feed paper for our dot matrix printer that
would be on desk itself. There was a small book shelf on the top. It
was finished with nice big casters on the bottom. It has held up
pretty well over the years and my dad still uses it as a computer desk
in Concord, MA.

Next door up the street was Alok G who was a year behind me in
school. He also had an NES so we would play and swap games
sometimes. I particular loved to
play R. C. Pro-Am
at his house, but I don't think he ever let me borrow it because he
liked it a lot as well. Alok had too little sisters, Nandita and
Neha. Being closer to our age, Nandita used to get in a lot of trouble
with us, while Neha was just a sweet little girl.

The next house up the street belonged to the Martins, who we knew from
Holy Cross Church. My freshmen
year that had an exchange student from Mexico, Eduardo A, who was from
outside Cancun on the Yucatan peninsula. I hung out a fair about with
Eduardo. He taught us some Spanish vocabulary that words our Spanish
teacher certainly did not appreciate hearing in her class room. I took
him skiing and he really took to it quickly. He was barreling down the
hill with no fear by the end of his first day.

A later owner has made significant changes to the house. The garage
was moved to the left and the old garage apparently remade into living
space. An above ground pool was added behind the house along with an
addition surrounded by a patio.

As you can see, I have my freshmen year schedule among a number of
high school papers my mom preserved and gave to me. She gave me some
others as well, although some were preliminary schedules that changed
through the year. However, my freshmen schedule is exactly how I
remember it.

Not shown on the schedule is home room where we collected to start the
day with taking attendance as well as hearing announcements. I had
homeroom with Mr. Monterosso. Homeroom assignments were done
alphabetically be last name, so I had homeroom with people like Shelley
B, Donna C, Andy C, etc. Locker assignments were similarly done
alphabetically, and they did attempt to locate them near our
homeroom. My locker was next to Donna's and Andy's in the hall outside
Mr. Monterosso's classroom. Shelley's was not too far to the right of
ours. I believe another later friend Rebecca D had her locker near
there as well freshmen year, until she unilaterally moved her locker
upstairs near Mr. Daley's classroom, although Rebecca, with her last
name a little later in the alphabet, was in different homeroom across
the hall from ours.

Mr. Kilbride's first period social studies class was conveniently next
door to Mr. Monterosso's room. On the first day of Global Studies, he
showed us a documentary of an indigenous tribe that had only recently
made contact with the outside world. There was lots of giggling at the
sight of topless women. Most days were not so exciting, as
Mr. Kilbride had a very rigid way of lecturing. He had a very
hierarchical outline for the years curriculum which he revealed
line-by-line as he lecture and we all took it down line-by-line in our
notebooks. He used to spice things up with the occasional pop quiz at
the start of the period, which was not a great way to start the
day. Note on the schedule that the class is marked A2, which was
because there was no A1 honors class for freshmen social studies. That
said, most of the people I remember from the class were in fact honors
students, including Amy K, Brian H, Rebecca D, and Christian T.

From Mr. Kilbride's classroom I had to haul myself upstairs and to the
far end of other wing for Mrs. Lewis's English class. Although I wasn't
a fan of the class, I have some good memories of Romeo and Juliet. We
read portions aloud in class, most memorably a reading
of Act
I, Scene I in which there was much biting of thumbs of
people. Seth C and Alan G where similarly amused, and were seen
"biting thumbs" at people as they went down the hall after
class. As part of Romeo and Juliet, we also spent two days watching
the West
Side Story movie, after which we were all either humming or
compulsively tapping out the rhythm of the song America. We also read
One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and I believe we watched the Jack
Nicholson movie as well, although I might have just rented it on my
own, watching it on our recently acquired VCR. Another memorable novel was
I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which upset my mother when I showed
her the rape and sex scenes. We also got to choose our own book to
review, subject to Mrs. Lewis approval. I picked
Catch-22, which
she thought was an excellent choice, which warned me that my review
wouldn't live up to her expectations. Even though I liked the book, my
write up disappointed Mrs. Lewis as expected. I was worried that my
lackluster performance my hurt my chances of getting into the
Humanities honors program in sophomore and junior year, which combined
both English and social studies, but I survived Mrs. Lewis class well
enough to continue on the honors track sophomore year. It was all made
more bearable with the help of my friends Ariel B, Rich S, Sasie T,
and Jennifer T.

Where I went third period depended on the day. Earth science lab was a
one day a week supplement to earth science. I'll talk more about that
later, but I will say I loved playing with the earth and water
table. I got to relive all my experiences building damns in streams
around Owings, MD, in miniature. PE was always not very fun freshmen
year, it was single sex and combined with the
sophomores. Unfortunately, the sophomores had first pick on activities,
so as freshmen we often didn't get to do what we wanted. Fortunately
freshmen year was the last one for square dancing. I don't remember
going to study hall much, I typically got a pass out from Mr. Daley to
go and do something else, such as going to the library.

For fourth period I had Mr. Benedict for "advanced"
art. Advanced art was really an elective for non-freshmen who had
already taken the required one year of art class. However, because of
scheduling constraints several freshmen were dumped in to Mr
Benedict's class including myself, Geeta D, and Kim K. We were thrown
in sink-or-swim, there wasn't any formal lecturing or even group
instruction, just Mr. Benedict walking around talking with people about
their work. Unlike the other freshmen art classes, this class was not
a social experience; Mr. Benedict did not let us talk amongst
ourselves as we worked. At the beginning of the year I did pencil
drawings. One was of a Dutch wooden shoe. Another was of a battered
metal water bucket. Later in the year I did an oil painting. I wanted
to do a painting based on a photo of a sunset over the Pacific when my
family had driven down the coast of California in the summer of
1987. However, Mr. Benedict wanted me to paint something in the
classroom. The most colorful thing was a pair of leotards that hanging
on the wall. It is hard to imagine, but I believe those were the only
three works I did that year, not even finishing the painting, which I
abandoned unfinished in the class room. Others in my boat did better
than I did. Kim did a pencil drawing of the faucets and pipes over the
large sink we used for cleaning our paint brushes for which she won an
award.

Most periods were 40 minutes long. However fifth and seventh periods
were only a half hour for lunch. The sixth period was basically a
filler period to pad out the shorter periods to accommodate an full
class. So students either had fifth period lunch followed by a class
in the 06-07 period or a class during 05-06 period followed by seventh
period lunch.

Freshmen year I had a 05-06 period class. Fortunately, it was one of
my favorite classes in my entire life, Mr. Daley's, soon to be Dr
Daley's, earth science class. Mr. Daley was co-author of our
textbook, Earth
Science: A Study of Changing Planet , something I would see a lot
at MIT, but not something rarely seen in high school. Despite the fact
that he wrote the book, he never issued assignments from it,
preferring instead to teach the material through lectures supplemented
demonstrations and the occasional movie. On particularly memorable
movie was the
collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. If you haven't even seen
the video, I highly recommend watching it. Below is a color version
from YouTube, in high school we watched a black and white newsreel
version.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse

Another cool thing we did with Mr. Daley was to take a walk to an old
quarry behind the high school. While on the walk he pointed out many
things including some poisonous plants to avoid for our own sake and
some endangered plants to avoid for their sake. At the quarry he
pointed out lots of different things about the different rocks as well
as the structure of the cliff side. The quarry really was a cool place
and I would take other friends back here in the future and several
times climbed to the top.

Some people I remember being with in Mr. Daley's class were Amy K,
Samantha M, and Erin S. Erin was a tall, athletic, and popular girl
who was a class officer. I knew her from church school at Holy
Cross. Erin's mom was from Germany and our mother's seemed to have
bonded over both being immigrants. They knew each other better than we
Erin and I knew each other. My mom would often try and stop and visit
Erin's mom when she was in DeWitt to deal with issues when we were
renting our old houses after they moved to Boston. Surprisingly, I
don't recall who I shared my two person desk with, it might have been
Chris S, who was later my chem and bio partner, and I did sit with
junior year for sure. Peter E probably was there as well, and perhaps
Rebecca D, since I remember comparing test grades with them.

Although Mr. Daley required us to do a science project of some kind, I
don't recall what I did. One previous student's experiment had been to
count the number of times Mr. Daley said "OK". I don't recall the
results of the experiment, such as whether some days were more "OK"
than others. What I do remember is that Mr. Daley had a large wooden
sign consisting of the letters "OK" at the front of his room next to
his chalkboard to commemorate the student's project.

For 08-09, which really was just a regular period, I had two different
electives. For the first half of the year I had Mr. DeOrio for
mechanical
drawing. This kind of pencil drawing was more my style. Although
AutoCAD was available on personal computers, at the time we were still
taught the old school ways on drafting tables. We did a series of
assignments through the course including hand lettering, a top down
view of an athletic
field,
isometric projections of mechanical objects, and a cutaway view. I
still prefer to draw arrowheads as two curved tangent lines as I
learned from Mr. DeOrio. I believe Rich S was in the class with me,
certainly Rich S and his friend Mike V were in a couple of Mr. DeOrio
classes with me over the years.

The second half of the year I had Mr. Jerauld's computer programing
class. In this first course, we
did
structured BASIC programming on some flavor of Apple II. Since I
clearly far ahead of the material presented, Mr. Jerauld gave me extra
work to do. One extra assignment was to implement arbitrary precision
integer addition by using strings to present numbers. Note that I
have no idea why "PRPG" was used to abbreviate "programming" on my
class schedule above, but I assure you it is not a transcription typo.

For 10th period Spanish I had Mrs. Sorkin, wife of Mr. Sorkin, my 8th
grade social studies teacher. I managed to skip into Spanish II thanks
to surviving honors Spanish in 8th grade, so there were a few
sophomores in my class. One was Kim W, daughter of the middle school
technology teacher. The other was Matt E, brother my friend Peter E.
J-D seemed a very small world sometimes. Geeta D from art class
and Amy K were also along from the ride in Spanish.

11th period was the end of the day. Fortunately, I didn't have to walk
far, only next door to Mr. Bugaj's class room for Course II math. I
had a lot of fun in math with Jennifer T and Dave Y. Jennifer sat next
to me and always had fruit snacks which she shared with Dave and
I. The downside of this sugar rush was that Dave used to poke me in
the back from behind, although he always denied it. I often got the
math homework from the day from Rebecca D, so I often spent the time
in class finishing the homework, if I hadn't already.

Activities Freshmen Year

At first, the move from middle school to high school at
Jamesville-DeWitt did not seem like such a big deal. Only one middle
school fed into the high school, so we knew most of our
classmates. Although academic classes had been split into House II and
House III in middle school, people knew each other from classes such
art and foreign language as well as the music or sports programs, not
to mention the lunch room.

However within the first couple of weeks, it was clear that a big
difference between middle school and high school were the after school
activities. As freshmen we were suddenly submerged in social
activities with sophomores, juniors, and seniors. This probably wasn't
as big a deal for people who had been on the middle school sports
teams, because they had probably played with at least some of the
sophomores, but to me it suddenly widened my social circle to people
with similar interests.

One activity I started was math team with Mr. VanSiclen. Probably the
nerdiest of all possible nerd activities. We didn't meet regularly or
have practices. We did have home and away meets with the other local
high school math teams. Meets involved sitting in a room and several
rounds of math problems. Each round consisted of two problems with a
fixed time limit. Giving us two problems per period forced us to
figure out how to manage our time, whether to just focus on one
problem or try to tackle both. Afterward, the home team would
typically provide snacks! Our rank for the season was determined by
how many points we earned in each match. I did well enough to earn a
trophy at the county level at least on year in high school. The best
people from the county also went to compete at the state level
competition. They year I went our county team won most improved,
making me glad I hadn't gone the previous year. There also was a
yearly time written test competition in each county. Freshmen year I
managed to take 6th place in the county. Unfortunately, Mr. VanSiclen
was transferred to the middle school before I had him as a teacher in
class. He really seemed like a great guy. After his departure,
Mrs. Reed took over as math team adviser junior year.

Mock trial was a
new activity at Jamesville-DeWitt my freshmen year, advised by my
homeroom teacher Mr. Monterosso. The basic idea of mock trial is that
two teams of students act out the roles of attorneys and witnesses,
with one team acting as the plaintiff and the other as defense. Local
lawyers and sometimes even judges decide the case based on efforts of
each team. Unfortunately, there are a limited number of roles to play
and as a reserved freshmen I didn't have a formal role. However, for
fun I acted in the unofficial role as bailiff during a couple of
trials and it was fun to work with the team as it went to the
semi-finals that year.

My favorite club freshmen year was PAC, the Political Affairs
Club. This club was also advised by Mr. Monterosso, who seemed to have
too much free time! Unlike math team which only met as needed and mock
trial which was small and new, PAC was a large club with officers,
weekly meetings, fund raisers, trips, and even a weekly newsletter,
the PAC News. In one way it was even nerdier than math team, as
members in good standing even received course credit, as noted on my
course schedule where it notes that on Thursdays during the after
school 12th period I was taking the international relations
seminar. This probably was a better description, since most of the
focus of PAC was on participating in Model United Nations.

When I moved to J-D I stopped going to boy scouts. I went to a couple
of meetings in 7th grade but the troop seemed to be mostly about
fooling around playing games in the gym that working on badges and
going camping, although I think Robert T did stick with it and made
Eagle Scout. However, during junior year in high school did get
involved in
the Explorers
program which was affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America. I
participated in two programs.

The first was focused
on
aviation and had activities sponsored
by The 174th
Fighter Wing of the Air National Guard out at Hancock Field. Allen
S went along with me. The most memorable activity was riding in an old
Vietnam-era Huey
helicopter, which had visible patches over the old bullet holes. We
also saw the wing's newly arrived F-16A Fighting Falcons, although I
thought the recently departed A-10 Thunderbolt II planes had more
personality.

The
second
engineering program was focused on computers. It was sponsored by
one of the big companies out by Carrier Circle, perhaps Carrier, but
it also could have been GE, which at the time still had a presence in
Syracuse. This was a much smaller group that the aviation group, we
actualy had some hands on time with some older terminal style
computers. They made the mistake of teaching us how to chat between
the terminals and then they had trouble getting us to focus on the
other activities.

Rebecca came to the first aviation meeting with me, or perhaps it was
a general Explorers kick off meeting before we started the invidual
special interest groups. She made a stink about the fact that the
application involved accepting at least a version of
the Scout
Law, which requires reverences towards God. Rebecca didn't
understand why the membership paperwork for a career program would
have any such language in it. I'm happy to see they have specifically
removed some of this baggage with the creation of a new parent
organization Learning for Life. They still have a focus on character
and ethics, but it seems the religious basis has been dropped.

One final activity I had freshmen year in high school was
CCD,
also known as church school. One morning a week my mom would take me
to Holy Cross Church for religions education. Afterward, a very
strange thing would happen, a public school bus would show up to take
us all to the high school, where we had missed part of the first
period of the day. I've never quite understood why the public school
did this for the Catholic church. In middle school, I saw many Jewish
kids ride the regular school bus to a Hebrew school never my house on
Jamesville Road, but it certainly wasn't a special bus and they didn't
miss any academic time to attend! In middle school, I forget the
details, but I think we just had the usual after Mass Sunday school. I
had a couple of friends in CCD. One was Brian B, who lived up Hamilton
Drive from me in middle school. Another was Kim K, who I was in
several classes with. Several of the more popular kids were also in
CCD such as Mike D, and the twins Jenna and Robin F, although that
didn't seem to make them act any more Christian to me or each
other. Robert T, who we all expected to be a future politician, was
also in CCD as well as being a church usher. My favorite person in CCD
was Erin, the girl I mentioned from Earth Science class. She loved to
raise such fun questions such as "Why couldn't women be priests?" and
"Were all of our Jewish friends going to Hell?". The later question
caused a controversial answer from the over zealous lay person that
was filling in instructor at the time, leading to his replacement with
someone a little more knowledgeable of church doctrine, the new young
priest in the church.

One off campus activity I did was Junior
Achievement (JA). In our JA program, we create an ran a small
business named Futura Enterprises. We held our meetings at
East-Syracuse Minoa high school, and our chapter was sponsored
by Carrier,
maker of air conditioners, at the time a major employer on the east
side of Syracuse, who also provided our advisers. Freshmen year we
made and sold first aid kits. If I recall correctly, everyone bought
shares which provided the working capital for the company. The
shareholders then elected the senior management including the
presidents and vice presidents of sales, finance, quality assurance,
etc. I was Assistant VP of Quality Assurance and helped make sure that
all the kits contained the proper items and were properly packaged.
Everyone also acted as salesmen. I received a pin for selling $400
dollars worth of kits. Donna C was also involved, I believe she might
have been VP of Sales and got us a table to sell the kits at a mall on
the west side of Syracuse around Christmas time. In the end I'm not
sure we did much more than break even, using what little we made to
throw a party at the end of the year, but it certainly was a fun
learning experience. We were the #1 sales company for Carrier. People
were a lot more motivated to sell stuff when it was for their own
company than the usual fund raiser.

Speaking of fund raisers, PAC did a annual car wash fund raiser at a
gas station on the corner of Erie Boulevard East and Kinne Road. They
also sold M&M's, and Amy K noted in my yearbook that I was
excellent pusher. Another fund raiser I did was an American Diabetes
Association Bike-a-Thon along the Erie Canal with Stephen S.

Life Freshmen Year

Freshmen year I went trick or treating with Dave C. I went dressed in
a low effort hobo costume, basically dirtying up some old poor fitting
clothes with some dirt and charcoal. I got dropped off at his house on
Jamesville Road near Patsy Lane, which itself was not that far from my
old house on Michaels Drive. We didn't get very far really. He headed
up Hamilton Parkway until we reached our classmate Shelley B's house
just past Westerly Terrace. There we spent the evening in Shelley's
dining room just hanging out. After that I became good friends with
Shelley, we ended up talking on the phone almost nightly about
homework, music, gossip, crushes.

In November I went to my first Model United Nations conference as a
part of PAC. It was the Hilton
MUN held a little over an hour west of us in a suburb of
Rochester, NY. I had joined PAC because of the people, but had no idea
what to do with myself in committee since I was afraid to get up and
speak. What I ended up doing was passing notes with people in
committee, usually our specially designed for the occasion notepads
with custom letterhead with some horrible pun about our country
Turkey, probably put together by one of my friends like Adam L who
worked at DECC, the school district print shop that was located at the
high school. Besides talking to other people from my high school that
were representing other countries in the same committee, I also ended
up talking a lot with a girl named Michelle. Apparently she had a
little crush on me, she actually even wrote a letter or two to me
during the rest of the school year hoping we'd coordinate to see each
other at future conferences, especially at next years Hilton.

My friendship with Shelley continued to grow throughout the fall. I
exchange Christmas gifts freshmen year. She gave me the Joshua Tree
album by U2 on cassette tape which I still have for sentimental
reasons, even though I have the same album on DVD and ripped to MP3s.

January was the date for the next big Model UN conference. This one
was CNYMUN and was run by our rival
high school to the east, Fayetteville-Manilus. It was held at Syracuse
University so we didn't have any fun bus ride. However it did give us
a chance to explore the university area without much adult supervision
during our breaks such as lunch.

Shelley and I exchanged carnations during the Valentines
Day chorus fund raiser, one of their numerous holiday fund raisers,
the first time I ever bought flowers for a girl, even if it was a
prearranged "just friends" gesture.

In February NAIMUN, the North
American Invitational Model United Nations, was held in Washington,
DC. PAC sent a large group, renting a charter bus for the overnight
trip, but it was fewer people than attended Hilton and CNYMUN. At
NAIMUN we represented New Zealand. Since we only represented one
country as opposed to the handful at the regional conferences, each
committee had two students. I was paired with D'Vorah B, who was PAC
president, and later in the year had the title role in our high
school's production of Peter Pan.

During the NAIMUN trip, We usually had one morning free and I went
with my roommate Chris M to visit
the
Organization of American States (OAS). We first went to visit a
relative of his that worked in the OAS office building. We then
proceeded to a tour of the Pan American Union building, the
headquarters of the OAS, which faces on The Ellipse in front of the
White House.

At NAIMUN, in addition to the usual UN General Assembly, committees,
and Security Council, they also used to hold an Inter-Nation
Simulation (INS). I never participated in INS at NAIMUN, Jessica D was
frequently our representative, but as I understood it, participants
would act out the roles of various nations to a crisis
situation. Actions were not limited to UN activities, but could
include any form of diplomacy, including military action. I believe
that the INS organizers would decide on the results of each participanAt's
actions as they tried to resolve, or perhaps escalate, the crisis.

Chris M ran his own personal INS my freshmen year in high
school. Although the name was derived from the NAIMUN INS, it was more
along the lines of combining D&D and Risk. Chris's INS was set in
the ancient archipelago of Greece. Players started out on different
parts of the world, only aware of their own immediate surrounding
neighbors, without even a full map of the world. Players had a
treasury, income from taxes based on their land, and expenses in the
form of maintenance, largely based on the size of their army. Each
week players would hand in their turn, which was a written set of
instructions of what to buy and what actions to take in terms of
exploration or interaction with other players. Chris as "dungeon
master" would then decide the results of the interactions of all the
players. I was unfortunate not to get in on it at the beginning, but
followed vicariously though others friends that were playing such as
Stephen S. Later other people ran their own INSs, including my friend
Dave C. Later I tried to run my own, using our solar system as the
laid out on a polar graph paper as my map. My game was not as popular
because my military units were not that original and people were
frustrated about planning ahead to where planets would be so that
their fleets would arrive at the right place at the right time.

One day, just like that, I became friends with my classmate Rebecca
D. I had known Rebecca mostly as a friend of Donna C from middle
school. I had been in House II with Donna, but Rebecca was in House
III so we didn't overlap in any academic classes. However, Donna and
Rebecca knew each other through chorus, in fact I think I recall them
performing a vocal duet together in the middle school auditorium.

Now that I was in high school, Rebecca and I were in several classes
together. We had Mr. Kilbride for first period social studies and I
believe Mr. Daley for earth science before lunch. We also were both in
Course II math with Mr. Bugaj and English with Mrs. Culhane, although
in different periods. At first, we mainly knew each others as a group
competitors for the top scores in math and science, where everyone was
always trying to ace the tests. In the end, Peter E won the overall
class rank with Rebecca a close second. I never was a real contender
outside of math and science, especially after the "bad" influence of
Christian T in late sophomore year.

Rebecca and I were also in a number of clubs together, notably PAC and
math team. Math team was what probably turned us from us from
competitors to friends. One day after an away meet after school,
Rebecca's mom was late coming to pick her up. Since I walked home
anyway, I waited with her to keep her company. We actually ended up
walking down to the corner on Edinger Drive and hung out there waiting
for her mom to show up in her white Ford Taurus station wagon.

After hanging out that afternoon waiting for her mom, Rebecca and I
started having a more social, although still competitive
relationship. We started talking on the phone about homework, gossip,
etc. When the weather got nicer, she invited me to come along to the
pickup Ultimate
Frisbee games up at the high school which were largely attended by
the high school musical theater community.

On Saint Patrick's day, my sister Rachael came to live with us. While
technically a foster child at the time, that was the day that Rachael
joined our family. She was 4 at the time, but about to turn 5 in
May. I came home from high school early that day to meet Rachael.

My parents had tried to adopt a child since we were in Arkansas. They
even explored adoption of
an Amerasian
when we were in South Korea. However, moving every couple of
years often placed us low on the list for children. When we finally
were in one place for more than two years, it wasn't too long before
Rachael came along.

It was exciting to have a little sister after having been a only child
for over fourteen years. I gave her piggyback rides as well as rides
on my back. She had brought some toys with her from her former foster
home. One of them was a very annoying monkey that made lots of noise
which was triggered by either noise or motion. I would try to hide the
monkey to have some peace and quiet because it was distracting even
when it was in Rachael's room next door. I'd often just bury it under
other things in her closet so I couldn't be accused of taking it from
her. I think she also brought with her a less annoying blue talking
robot with buttons on the front where some kind of learning cards
could be inserted. However, Rachael doesn't recall this robot toy at
all!

Rachael had these toys from the Woods, her previous foster parents,
who lived south of Syracuse off of I-81. The Woods were an older
couple who took care of many foster children simultaneously until they
could find permanent homes. Rachael was fortunate to spend most of her
life before us with the Woods and never had to deal with being bounced
from foster home to foster home. Still, it did make it a big
transition to move in with a new family, leaving behind people she had
known all her life. My parents did take her to visit the Woods
periodically while they still lived in Syracuse, although I never went
along on any of these trips.

Rachael's social worker was Candice "Candy" Allen. She was the person
that brought Rachael that Saint Patrick's day and came to check on her
on several occasions to make sure she was settling in. She also had a
talk with me once about adopting a sibling, I'm sure all in the course
of moving forward with the adoption. She also was there when we went
to family court appearance where Rachael's adoption was made final. I
believe I was there that day in case I was needed but required to wait
outside during the family court proceedings, never entering the
judge's chambers.

Even though we got rid of the junker upright piano when we moved out
of Michaels Drive, during freshmen year we inherited a 1935 Kimball
baby grand (Serial #409480). It had belonged to my grand aunts Lily,
Lydia, and Alma Carlstrom in Dubois, PA. When I was a preschooler,
Lily had taught me to
play Chopsticks
and Mary
Had a Little Lamb on the piano. When my dad and uncle moved Grand
Aunt Alma up to nursing home in western New York, my dad brought home
the piano.

I took piano lessons with two different teachers when I was in
DeWitt. The first teacher was a man who lived over near James Street
in Syracuse. I had a book of popular music and learned to play
Foreigner's
I Want to Know What Love Is. After that it was around Christmas as
I learned a version of
the The First
Noel. However, I was not with this teacher long before be moved
away. The second instructor I had was a woman off of East Genesee
Street near Nottingham High School. She wrote sheet music for me to
learn from. I first learned
Genesis's Invisible
Touch but then spent a lot of time perfecting a performance of the
theme from the TV show
Cheers, Where
Everybody Knows Your Name. Alas, I was never going to be a
virtuoso and eventually my mom let me stop taking lessons. After the
many years of various school and private music lessons, I was able to
learn to play a simple melody with my right hand by sight reading, but
never able to play both with both hands simultaneously without a
significant amount of practice. Friends like Rebecca who could do be
piano accompanists without much practice have always amazed me.

Later in the spring I went and ruined my friendship with Shelley by
telling her I liked her when I knew full well that she infatuated with
a cute guy from the football team. I'm not sure what led me to reveal
my secret, but I can imagine that my friendship with Rebecca had gone
strong enough that she convinced me to open up to Shelley.

It always seemed to make sense to me to want to date girls I was
friends with but the odds seem to be against it. Of the eight
relationships I've had, I was good friends with four of them before
dating, which at 50% might sound like good odds. If however I add in
all the friends that were girls that I failed to turn into
girlfriends, it start to seriously erode that statistic.

With Shelley no longer a close friend, I spent more time talking to
Rebecca, especially as summer approached. In time, I grew to have
feelings for Rebecca as well. Having been burned twice, once in middle
school and once with Shelley, I kept these feelings to
myself. Fortunately, this was made easier by the fact that Rebecca was
usually happily involved with upperclassmen, which made it seem
pointless to share my feelings with her. For example, towards the end
of freshmen year she went to the senior prom with Geoff S, with whom I
believe she had some romantic attachment at the time.

At the end of the year I ran for the credit officer position in
PAC. The credit officer had the role of actually taking attendance and
filing out report card sheets for students that were eligible for
International Relations Seminar credit. Not exactly as exciting a role
as president, vice president, treasurer, or secretary, but it was
still something. To run for office we had to write a letter of intent
and then speak at the PAC meeting, which ironically was something I
had never been brave enough to do. Unfortunately, even though I
survived the public speaking, I lost to Alex V in what I was told was
a close election. Although I had been friends with Alex, who was a
close friend of Matt E who I knew from Spanish and PAC, this would be
the first step in Alex becoming my secret nemesis.

As part of the end of the year activities, the school held an awards
ceremony on 2 June 1988. I received awards for Computers, Mathematics,
and Service. I'm not really quite sure what I did to receive the
Service award...

The end of the year also brought the delivery of our "Hilltop
Echoes" yearbooks. Unfortunately, after mine had been signed by a
number of my friends, it was stolen. However, since the entries from
my friends would serve to identify, the thief quickly ripped out all
the pages, even the inside cover pages, and threw them out in a
library trash can. Fortunately, the librarians knew me and recognized
the pages as mine and got them back to me, so I still have the most
important part of the yearbook. In addition, the yearbook people
managed to get me an extra copy and I don't think they even made me
pay for it. Sophomore year I wrote my name in red on the side of the
pages so traces of my name couldn't be so easily removed.

Summer 1988

In the summer of 1988 I went to my first residential summer camp. It
was part of the Center for Talent Youth (CTY) of John Hopkins
University. Unlike your stereotypical lakeside outdoors summer camp,
CTY camps were on various small college campuses and students took
college level classes during the day, ate in college dining halls, and
stayed in college dorms at night. You even had to take the college
board SATs as part of applying to get into the camp. Those that
attended CTY were under no delusions that this was a typical camp and
it was often described by campers as "Nerd Camp", as in the
Slate article My Summers at
Nerd Camp.

However, in many respects CTY had the most important elements of a
summer camp. It was a place away from parents dominated by kids and
run largely by college students who were often former campers. No
matter what activities were on the official schedule, the main focus
of camp was on the less unstructured leisure time where friendships
were made and summer romances were sparked leading up to the ritual
filed weekend dances where many would make their first move.

I recently heard the NPR
story Are
You Ready For The Summer? Camp, That Is which pointed out that
camp is a place where you can reinvent yourself. I think I
subconsciously realized this before I even went. I twisted my mom's
arm to get some new clothes for camp. I had signed up for Creative
Writing even though I was math and science geek that largely hated
English class, probably because I thought I would meet more girls that
way, probably on the advice of Rebecca D and David G would had
previously attended CTY.

My first CTY summer I went to Dickinson College in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania. My parents came with me to my dorm room where we met my
roommate Mike P. I didn't do much with him socially, but he had the
album containing the
song Electric
Blue which I liked to listen to. I did develop a group of friends
on my hall, a couple of nights we broke curfew and hung out
together. One night we used the backlight from my handheld TV
(mentioned earlier) to play cards by.

The campus was nice but sometimes felt a little spread out. Looking at
the campus
map, I crossed from the residences in the upper left corner of the
center of campus to the academic quad across College Street for
class. In the morning, I used to walk with some other guys a little
toward the center on our way to the HUB for breakfast to meet up with
some girls we knew from the lower quad. In the afternoon, I would
often cross Cherry Street behind my dorm to go down to the pool in the
athletic complex. And although I had forgotten the name of the Anita
Tuvin Schlecter (ATS) Auditorium, I remembered its distinctive
architecture and immediately placed it on the campus map. There were
dances held at ATS as well as the talent show which included
performances of "Castle on a Cloud" from Les Miz and a sing
along version of
Day-O, the
Banana Boat Song, which had been in the recently released movie
Beetlejuice as well as a slide show accompanied by the then hit
"Don't Worry, Be Happy".

The Creative Writing class itself was, well a lot of writing, as well
as a fair amount of reading. One of the books on the reading list was
"The Little Brown Reader". The class itself was often workshop like,
with people reading the work and receiving comments. Unfortunately, I
wrote a lot of on nerdy topics such as flying and space, not hiding my
geekiness before the fair ladies of the class. Fortunately, it did
make me friends with a similarly spirited guy as well as some of the
nicer girls in the class.

Speaking of flying, I took part in a paper airplane contest during
some "mandatory fun" time. I actually won the distance
contest using a relatively basic dart design. My secret weapon was
getting a friend with a good baseball arm to hurl it. It basically hit
the dorm on the other side of the area being using for the contest and
no one else could touch that.

One strange thing about the Dickinson College is that it was the
Washington Redskins summer training camp. I had been a Redskins fan
since they won Super Bowl XVII when I lived in Maryland and it was a
little weird to see them wandering around the dining hall. Although
they had a separate seating area, we'd often run into them coming and
going to lunch. They played some sort of preseason game while I was at
CTY that I got to go to, picking up a Redskins Super Bowl XXII
champions shirt.

What I remember most was the dances. It was all about finding your
friends, gossiping about who was dancing with who, especially during
the slow dances, and trying to alternatively goad your friends to get
them to ask people to slow dance and trying to get your own courage up
to ask someone to slow dance. The song choices were highly ritualized,
and apparently not just over short periods of time, but over
years. For example, every dance playlist included Forever Young,
Stairway to Heaven, and American Pie and now even years later this is
still the case, now enshrined as
the Carlisle
Canon.

After dragging my feet for three weeks, I finally managed to get the
courage up to ask a girl to dance myself. Her name was Shali B and she
wasn't from my class, but someone who I had been hanging out with,
probably a roommate or hallmate of someone from class. The song turned
out to be U2's With or Without You and as we walked out on the floor,
I realized I had not thought this out. I had never slow danced with a
girl before and I had no idea what to do. Fortunately, Shali quickly
realized this and showed me how to do a simple shuffle dance. We
mostly just made small talk during the actual dance after which we
returned to group dance with our friends for the final songs.

Leaving camp was hard as I really had just started to really come out
of my shell and have some real friends. Ironically I didn't even
realize how some people felt about me until the end. It was a CTY
tradition to have a book for exchanging addresses and writing yearbook
like entries to your friends. I surprised at how touching a lot
entries were, which just made it harder to leave these people
behind. I did correspond with a number of my camp friends over the the
rest of the summer but things slowed down once the year started.

Later in the summer after CTY, we headed to St Paul, Minnesota
for AAAI-88. We
attended a outside reception at the zoo and thinking Minnesota was a
pretty hot place to be in August. We visited an old couple who were
distance Carlstrom relatives while we were there, Minnesota having
lots of folks of Swedish decent. They gave my sister Rachael a stuffed
animal, a rabbit I believe, that was a favorite of hers for a long
time. On this trip we also went up to Duluth as well as to
the Iron Mountain Iron
Mine near the Minnesota Michigan border.

In an experiment sophomore year traditional homerooms were
eliminated. In their wisdom they didn't reassign lockers, so some
people had quite a trip from their locker to their first class.

I started off first period each day in Miss Kuon's Spanish
class. Miss Kuon always seemed a little grouchy, but friends like Kim K
in the class made it more bearable. We survived the New York State
Regents Spanish exam somehow.

Second period took me down to the end of the hall for Mr. Stopher's
chemistry class. The first day I tried to get a seat in front of my
friend Kim K but some guy I didn't know beat me to it and I got stuck
sitting to the right of him instead. After Mr. Stopher made the days
seating assignment permanent, I was even more livid. Who did this guy
think he was? I wasn't even sure who he was. His name was Scott S and
he seemed familiar, but it turned out he was a new student to J-D. He
was just so friendly it was hard to stay mad at him and we became fast
friends, soon best friends, and later Scott was best man at my
wedding. We can thank Kim for bringing us together. Even so, I didn't
end up as chemistry lab partners with Scott, but instead with another
friend Chris S. Some other friends in the class included Geeta D who
was friends with Kim and might have sat behind me and Rebecca D who
sat in the back vaguely behind Kim. Christian T might have been there
too, causing trouble off to the left.

Third and fourth period were scheduled together for the honors
humanities program of sophomore and junior year. Half of us had English
followed by social studies and the others were the opposite
order. Occasionally we would meet together for a double period and,
when preparing for the humanities festival, we would also meet with
the juniors in the program as well.

For third period we had Mr. Kilbride for a second year in a row for the
second year of global studies. Peter E was in the class with me. A lot
of people didn't like Mr. Kilbride as much as the colorful Mr
Monterosso, who we would have for US History the following year, but I
loved the very organized, very logical outline presentation of
material.

It was odd moving between third and fourth period because the whole
class moved en masse from Mr. Kilbride's class room downstairs
to the English classrooms at the end of the other wing upstairs. Half
way through we would meet our opposite half, marching from English
down to social studies.

For fourth period English we had Mrs. Spillane, the other of my two
favorite English teachers. The main book I remember reading that year
was The
Last of the Wine, which was an interesting piece of historical
fiction. Looking back I'm surprised they had us read something so
prominently featuring homosexuality. It did include the philosophers
Socrates and Plato as historical characters, which tied into our
humanities unit on philosophy. I had to present about the Stoic
philosophy
of Zeno, not
to be confused with the earlier
philosopherZeno,
who had all the
cool paradoxes.

After fifth period lunch, I had the two semester sequence with
Mr. Jerauld that led to the AP Computer Science exam. We used Borland
Turbo Pascal,
but not the PC version like I had at home. Instead, we used the CP/M
version running on a Apple IIgs with
a Microsoft Z-80
SoftCard! Mr. Jerauld imparted a couple of rules on me which I
still follow: Never compare a Boolean value to true or false and never
use a constant other than 0 or 1 in your code without giving it a
name.

Eighth period consisted of gym days alternating with study hall. Mr
Daley graciously provided me with passes to get of study hall to do
more interesting things.

Ninth period brought me to Mr. Nye's math class. I have many good
memories of this class with Christian T, Scott S, Kim K, Geeta
D. Christian used to antagonize Mr. Nye, often calling him Marsh,
occasionally swearing, more than once getting himself in
detention. Scott got in more than one arguments with Matt W, a
lacrosse player that was in the class. I forget what trigger these
arguments, but Matt's face would literally turn red from anger. It was
especially comically when Matt would get angry while wearing a huge
brace to stabilize his head and neck from some sports
injury. Christian would make fun of Scott to try and annoy him as
well, never quite sure why Christian thought so lowly of Scott,
perhaps it was just fun to try to make him lose his temper.

Two days a week the day ended with Mr. Polichemi, the other chemistry
teacher, doing large group instruction. Sometimes these large groups
sessions involving both chemistry classes were used for taking test,
always a fun way to end the day. On other three days I had study hall,
I seem to remember using this to go home early on occasion, although
on Thursdays I would to stick around for PAC.

Activities Sophomore Year

I was a member of mock trial but was even less involved this year. It
had started to grow in size and I was still too timid to really get
involved so it wasn't really much fun for me. Junior year it continued
to grow in size and I stopped going, focusing on other activities.

I did do Junior Achievement again sophomore year. I moved up to the VP
of Production role and Donna had a new role as well. This year we
decided to make beeswax candles and perhaps some other items, but I
found them to be much harder to sell that the first aid kits. That
said, the first aid kits had been a pretty easy sell, we suggested
people by them for their car and many people bought more than one and
even bought them as gifts for their grown kids. On the other hand,
most people end up with more candles than they will ever really use,
so although the might make a pity purchase, they did not buy a lot of
them, and the per item cost was much lower.

One thing that made Junior Achievement more fun was Tina H. Tina lived
on Maple drive just past Edinger Drive by my house. I think we met
because we noticed each other walking home from school. I dragged in
her into JA with me as well as PAC. Dave C was convinced she had a
crush on me but I was too chicken to do anything about it and by the
time I might have had the courage to do something about it we were
close enough friends for me to know that she was interested in other
guys. We remained friends during my sophomore year but grew apart as
she moved into different activities, with her leaving behind JA and
PAC for the more mainstream clubs like SADD.

The November 1988 election brought a bigger emphasis on
politics. A Teen
Age Republicans (TARS) club was formed co-chaired by Robert T and
Matt W, which I attended a few times. People often think that its
called Young Republicans because
of Alex
P. Keaton, but that is for college students, not high school. As
part of both TARS and PAC, I went with other students to several
campaign events. In the congressional race, both
Republican Jim
Walsh and his Democratic rival, a woman who's name I forget, came
and spoke to parents and students in the large group room at the
middle school. We also saw several presidential candidates. We saw
George H. W. Bush give a short daytime stump speech at The Galleries
of Syracuse. We went to a huge Jesse Jackson evening event at the
War
Memorial. We went to a Michael Dukakis town hall event where TARS
co-chair Robert T beleaguered the governor with questions about what
he would do improve the issue of teen age drinking with colorful
anecdotes about things he supposedly had seen at our school, such as
kids showing up under the influence in the morning.

Life Sophomore Year

The first time Scott and I talked on the phone we talked about
girls. This was quite unlike my past experiences with friends, were
getting them to talk about girls was like pulling teeth. Not only
that, but Scott actually had a girlfriend, Michelle, back in Congers
in Rockland County, NY, where he had gone to high school freshmen
year. Scott quickly guessed that I liked Kim K based on the way I had
acted in chemistry classes as well as his own appraisal of her.

However, after my unsuccessful wooing attempts of 8th and 9th grade, I
wasn't going to bet the farm on a one girl strategy. Instead it was
more of a horse race of potential love interests, a strategy Scott
referred to as "keeping your options open". So while Kim
might have held the number one position on the list, I also was
hedging my bets with Tina H, another new freshmen Laurie R, Rebecca D,
and Lisa W. Some like Laurie R never went anywhere more than the crush
stage as there was little in to develop a relationship. Others like
Rebecca were more on what we referred to as the "back burner" once
they were dating other people, as happened with Rebecca and Travis
C. What amazed Scott and others about my "keep your options
open" strategy is that the pragmatic possibility of an actual
relationship factored into it; other people had lists of who they
though the cutest girls and cutest boys were, but my list was really
about trying to focus my efforts on getting an actual girlfriend,
while broadening beyond the chase one girl at a time approach that
hadn't worked for me in the past.

Scott and I can up with a chemical system for discussing women while
bored in chemistry class. Mostly the code focused on encoding my own
list, so it focused more on my interests than Scott's. We would often
joke about the potential strong bonds a group 17 element with 1
missing electron in their p valence shell, such as my myself
represented by bromine, could form a strong chemical bond with group 1
elements with 1 matching electron in their s valence shell,
such as lithium, potassium, and rubidium.

Chemical

Symbol

Person

Bromine

Br

Brian (myself)

Potassium

K

Kim K

Rubidium

Rb

Rebecca D

Lithium

Li

Lisa W

Thorium

Th

Tina H

Chemical shorthand for people.
See the periodic table of the elements.

In the evenings when we were on the phone supposedly doing homework,
but really mostly discussing girls, we would also further multitask by
listening to music. Two particular songs sort of became theme songs
for our pursuit of girls. When things were not going well, the
favorite was George Michael's
melancholy Kissing
a Fool. When things were going well, Boy Meets Girl's
upbeat Waiting
For a Star to Fall.

We didn't just talk on the phone but also got together on the
weekends. Scott's house technically had an address on Lansdowne Road
which is where the front door was located, but for all practical
purposes the house was located on Erie Boulevard, sharing a parking
lot with the
Fairchild & Meech Funeral
Chapel. Scott was a fan
of Def Leppard
and he had a prominently
displayed Hysteria
poster on his wall, as well a Pink Floyd
Dark Side of the Moon poster, although he seemed to listen
to The Wall more
often. My parents never had cable so it was always fun to watch music
videos such
as Pour
Some Sugar on Me when I was over at Scott's house.

At some point Kim K started dating a junior, Alex V. I was in
shock. Not only had this guy beaten me in the PAC election the
previous year, but now he was dating the girl I liked. As weeks
passed, this didn't seem to be a short term affair, so Kim would have
to move to the back burner, causing a shake up of the list, where Kim
had been in first position for some time.

In the meanwhile Scott had become friends with Donna C. This had led
to me getting to know both Donna and her friend Lisa W
better. Secretly Scott was interested in Donna and Lisa had moved to
the top of my list. So it was both exciting and awkward when the we
became a platonic foursome. We went to movies together and even more
often we went to the Friendly's on Erie Boulevard. Lisa would always
pick three flavors that were an eclectic match to say the least. Once
on an extreme post-ice cream sugar high, Lisa started honking at cars
while we were waiting out front for one of our parent's to pick us up.
We usually went out on Saturday nights, Lisa spent Friday nights at
home watching her sister Lora while he parents were out for
Shabbat. I spent many of those Friday nights sophomore year chatting
with Lisa on the phone but kept my romantic feelings to myself. It was
just as well, by the time I did tell her after sophomore year had
ended, it didn't effect our friendship, and it was certainly easier to
hear that the major problem was that I wasn't Jewish, whether that was
true or not, than just about anything else.

Scott started working as a cashier at the now replaced Wegman's
grocery at the end of Maple Drive not long after starting school. I
hadn't had a job since my paper route in 8th grade and I soon joined
him. I took a job pushing carts in the parking lot, skipping the
cashier's training Scott had done. I pushed carts for six hours a day
on Saturdays and Sundays, with a half hour for lunch and two ten
minute breaks. The weather was pretty lousy in the winter with snow
turning to nasty sludge in the parking lot. I worked such fun days as
Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. I used to get in trouble for listing
to the radio while working, although on the coldest days, it was easy
to hide a tiny mono earplug and wire under my hat and neck warmer,
with the small radio in my pocket. I didn't last too long at
Wegman's. I eventually got tired about them complaining about all the
time off I was requested. Besides school MUN trips in November,
January, and February, my parents basically wanted to travel out of
town during any school vacation, missing two weekends for Thanksgiving
week and another two for February winter break. Perhaps I would have
been better off if I had done the cashier's training like Scott. He
was inside where it was warm and he got to talk to people and make
friends, something that didn't happen working by myself in the lot.

That winter I got sucked into the indoor track team by Dave Y and
Peter E. Dave's parents required that their kids get A's, play a
musical instrument, and play a sport. Dave's siblings had played on
the tennis team but Dave was going to do indoor track instead. Peter,
who rarely did an activity without Dave went along for the ride,
probably thinking it would be a good idea to round out his college
applications with a sport as well. Somehow a bunch of us nerds ended
up on the team that season including Stephen S, David G, Faramarz S,
and Philip G. Another friends of mine, Allen S, who actually could run
unlike the rest of us, was on the team as well. Daily practices were
not so bad since we all got to hang out together, but meets were
pretty embarrassing since most of us were as slow as molasses,
especially when they put four of us together in a relay race. I was
always happy not to be the slowest of four legs! One meet I bailed on
a meet because there was some concert at school that meant Stephen,
Peter, and Dave would all be missing that evening. The coach was
skeptical that I was in the band, but I claimed to play the trombone,
not mentioning that had been for one year in fourth grade. My dad, a
former high school tracker star who also ran in college, would be
disappointed by my short track career. The next year the only nerds
who stuck it out on the team would be Peter and Dave.

The Hilton MUN conference was again in November. This year I roomed
with Scott. We annoyed girls by calling to serenade them on the phone.
Our poor friend Donna got a lot of renditions of the
song Donna,
which recently had been made popular again due to the 1987
movie La
Bamba film about the singer Ritchie Valens. Another popular song
to sing
was You've
Lost That Lovin' Feelin', made popular by the 1986
movie Top Gun,
where Tom Cruise specifically sings it to try to win the girl's heart.

During Thanksgiving week I went to US Space
Camp's
Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama. I had wanted to attend the
Space Camp since I lived in Maryland. A few times my mom had even
checked availability but it was always booked. As I now know, summer
camps typically need to be booked the winter before to guarantee
availability but my parents never plan that far ahead. My interest was
renewed after
the SpaceCamp
movie that I saw with my father the summer before freshmen year at the
Shoppingtown Mall. I don't know what finally prompted my parents to
decided to send me, but it turned out that was an opening Thanksgiving
week and they signed me up. We drove down to Huntsville in the camper
and they dropped me off at the camp while the rest of them went to the
Florida panhandle on a weeks vacation.

Rachael and I both got to miss school, since we only had Thursday and
Friday of Thanksgiving week off. That is okay, I more than made up for
any lost class time by nerding out ahead of time reading the
Space Shuttle Operator's Manual . This turned out to be very
important because on of the first things they did when we arrived was
to take a pop quiz of our space knowledge, much of it about the space
shuttle. They used the results of the test to place us in our roles. I
had the second highest score and got to be commander of one of the two
missions. It was actually surprising to me how many non-geeky kids were
there considering this was a Space Camp for older kids over a holiday
week, but this was before I learned from Jennifer how many parents use
camps as 24/7 baby sitting over vacation.

One weird thing about being at Space Academy for Thanksgiving week was
that we had the whole facility to ourselves. There were not any other
groups of camper. We didn't have to wait in any long lines, often got
to use equipment more than once if we wanted. One particularly cool
thing is that we got to go to the IMAX theater
adjoining
United States Space & Rocket Center multiple times to see all
of the space movies they had such as "Hail Columbia!", "The Dream Is
Alive", and "Living Planet".

While the first commander flew their mission, I was assigned to a
mission control supporting one of the mission specialists. However, I
followed along with what the commander and pilot were doing, noting
all the locations of switches they needed to use in my Space Shuttle
Operator's Manual. When it came time to do my own mission, I was very
on top of all the procedures, including covering for my pilot when he
was assisting with using the robot arm. I also handle several alarms
before mission control have even noticed them on their end. However,
one alarm did surprise us. There was an actual smoke alarm going off
and they had to take us out of the simulator during the landing part
of our mission. We could smell the distinct odor of an electrical
short. I didn't feel too bad about missing the landing, we had already
done one in a practice mission earlier in the week.

Although square dancing was behind us, sophomore year brought us
something less corny but perhaps more terrifying: ballroom dancing. In
square dancing the nerdy boys like me often got stuck dancing either
with another boy or some very unhappy girl, but either way there was
minimal contact for both parties. Ballroom dancing was a little more
up close and personal and I was just dreading it the awkwardness of
some partner that didn't want to dance with me. When it came time to
find partners, they lined the boys and girls up across from each other
in the gym. But unlike they had done some years in square dancing,
they didn't just match us up one-by-one. They just turned us loose to
find a partner. Instantly the gym was a mob of people trying to find
other people. I was caught off guard by the mob and people were
rapidly matching up around me and I had no plan. Suddenly Kim K
materialized out of the crowd and asked if I would like to be her
dance partner. I was so shocked I don't even know how I indicated
yes. Here was the girl I had liked asked me to dance. Sure she had a
boyfriend but she had singled me out of the crowded gym, certainly
that didn't put me at the bottom of her list of friends that were
boys. I wasn't deluded enough to think that Kim had any feelings for
me but those few weeks of dancing with her were a major boost to my
self esteem.

With winter came skiing. Sophomore year I switched to skiing
at Toggenburg. I got a Friday
night season pass so I could go along with my friends Stephen, Dave,
and Peter. We got out of school around 2:30pm, it took about an half
an hour to get down to Tog, so we ended up skiing from 4pm to
10pm. Night skiing was pretty fun with all the lights. I hate to even
think about night skiing at Tahoe because once the sun goes down over
the mountain it suddenly feels a lot colder.

In January I represented Kampuchea in the Energy, Science, &
Technology (EST) committee at CNYMUN. I hoped the themes of EST would
make me more interested in actually getting involved in the committee,
but it turned out that politics could make anything dull, at least to
a fifteen year old. However, I did received a Certificate of
Recognition for help to fix a real technology issue with the
microphone.

The next month we headed to Washington, DC, for NAIMUN. I sat next to
Tina H on the bus ride down on the 15th. I had hoped we would stay up
all night and have a deep life altering conversation, but instead she
just tormented me by sleeping cutely next to me. It was probably just
as well I got some sleep because my roommate Robert T had gotten us
tickets for an 8:30am White House tour on the 16th. Robert had no
doubt flashed his TARS affiliation when requesting tickets for us from
the Hon. Jim
Walsh. Our delegation represented Romanian that year and I was in
committee with Peter E. Our whole delegation went to visit the
Romanian embassy where we each received a hard cover book written by
the now infamous (and late) Romanian
president Nicolae
Ceausescu. Thanks to Peter we won best delegate in our
committee. I wouldn't really feel like I earned a best delegate award
until ESMMUN.

Around February or March I started working on crew of the high
school's production
of The Music
Man, which was lead by the chorus teacher Mrs. Nye, ex-wife of my
math teacher Mr. Nye. Many of fellow honors classmates and PAC members
were involved in the musical either because they were in chorus or in
band such as Christian T, Erica H, Alex V, Samantha M, Rebecca D, Matt
E, Jennifer T, Kim K, Amy K, Jessica D. My first involvement was when
I was invited along one weekend afternoon to help with set
construction. However, I quickly focused on the more technical work of
lighting and sound crew. Lighting was lead by juniors Adam L and Steve
M and also included freshmen Steve W. Sound was lead by Chris M but
because he was also house manager, I ended up running the sound board
for the shows. During the final show the stage crew pulled a number of
pranks on the cast. One was to insert some adult material into the
book props used during the "Marian The Librarian" number, which would
occur to me later during my college production of "Sunday in the Park
with George".

By this point Alex V was my secret nemesis. He had beaten me in the
PAC election. He had gotten the girl. However, I decided that he was
not going to beat me again in the annual county math contest. I
borrowed the 11th grade precalculus book from Mr. Nye and read it in
my own free time so there wouldn't be anything he had studied that I
had not. I got as many old of the old contest questions as I could
and, with the help of my father, I made sure that I could solve all of
them. When the results came out, I found that I had not just beaten
Alex, but I took first place in the 1989 Onondaga County Mathematics
Teachers' Association (OCMTA) contest, receiving the largest trophy I
ever have won.

Later in the spring, I got to also travel by bus with the Onondaga
County team to the state math competition in the New York City
area. Although we were not one of
the winners
that year, we did win an award for most improved team, a perhaps
dubious honor for people that were on the team the previous year,
which fortunately didn't include me.

In April I went on trip just with my Dad to Spain because Rachael's
adoption not finalized and could not take outside the country beyond
Canada. We flew into Rota but no car rental place was open, took a
bus, and got stuck at a little town on top of hill and daylight was
running out. We managed to catch another bus down before the end of
the day, and eventually got somewhere where we could get a car and
made it to drove to Britain the the form of the strange land
of Gibraltar.
Later we worked our way east along the Mediterranean coast to Malaga
where and went skiing nearby
in Granada at the
Sierra
Nevada National Park. We first tried taking the road from the
south side of the Sierra Nevada National Park from Capilera, only to
find it closed near the top. We were running low on gas at that point,
so we coasted most of the way back down the mountain! The day we went
skiing, 20 April 1989, I tried to use my Spanish to buy lift tickets
before realizing the French woman selling tickets
at Sierra Nevada Ski
Resort spoke better English than my Spanish. Oh well!

In May, Rachael's adoption was finalized. We all went down to the
family court in downtown Syracuse. I was there in case they wanted to
talk to me but I ended up just waiting out in the hall.

Picture of Brian, Dad, and Rachael on her adoption day, May 1989.

One afternoon during Mr. Nye's math class I had a life changing
conversation with Christian T. Christian, who happened to live across
the street from Rebecca D, advised me that if I wanted to get a
girlfriend I needed to let up on my nerdy obsession with beating
everyone on math tests and not continue down the path of being a
technical theater geek. I never forgot this advice and started
prioritizing my social life over my academic life, which probably
brought me a lot of happiness in the big picture during high school
and even college.

At one point I revealed my crush on Rebecca to her through a game of
twenty questions. She was sad because she was between boyfriends and
bemoaning that no body liked her. I spoke up and said that I knew
somebody that did. When it was clear she thought it was sweet but did
not have an reciprocal feelings, I led her to believe it was something
in the past of freshmen year so as not to make things too awkward. I
have to say it was a much less traumatic experience that the last two
crushes I had revealed. In fact, the revelation only seemed to bring
us closer, as she promised to do what she could to find me a
girlfriend the next summer at CTY. In the meanwhile, Rebecca would
start dating Matt E, removing any temptation to actively pursue her.

With the end of the year came the annual J-D awards, this year on June
1st. I won again for Mathematics and Computers, which wasn't too
surprising since I had won the county math contest as well as received
a 5 on the Computer Science AP exam.

My academic competition with Rebecca continue, with both of us vowing
to beat each other on the chemistry Regents exam. However, it was not
to be. The morning of the exam, June 20th, the NY Post printed the
first page of the answers on its cover to highlight how easily
available copies of the exam were in New York City. The exam was
canceled state wide, I believe we found out after we started to take
the exam. For more on the story,
see Anger
but Not Surprise Follows Regents Fiasco
and The
Post's exam answer story.

I ran for PAC credit officer again this year. Unbelievably Alex V ran
for reelection. This was quite unorthodox, typically current officers
ran for higher level positions, they didn't simply stay in the same
position. Fortunately, this year I won the election over Alex. This
coming on top of my math team victory over Alex was making me feel
pretty good. Then even more unbelievably Alex and Kim broke
up. Apparently Alex had initiated the breakup, but there was no longer
any reason to treat Alex as my secret nemesis. Kim was suddenly
available which shook things up on my list considerably, but there was
no time left in the year to do anything about it.

Lisa W turned 16th on the 25th of June and had a birthday party at her
house. It was one of the few times we had an event at her house,
usually I was just there to drop her off or pick her up. One of the
things I remember about her house was her parents' collection of
matchbooks in a big bowl on their coffee table. We hung out in Lisa's
basement at the party, which included not just the usual suspects from
J-D but also Lisa's friends
from
USY, such as Erika R.

With the end of the year came student departures. It was strange for
me to have friends moving away instead of me being the one to be
leaving. The first departure was permanently with my friend Dave C
moving to California. The second departure was temporary, with
Christian T going to England junior year. He would come back senior
year with a Cockney accent.

Summer 1989

In the summer of 1989 I returned to CTY for a second time. Some things
were different this time around. First, I was going to Franklin &
Marshall (F&M) site in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Second, I was
going with someone I actually knew and had been to the site before, my
friend Rebecca D. Third, I gave up the pretense of caring about the
liberal arts and dived into their most advanced computer class,
Computer Science 3.

F&M seemed like a much better location for CTY than
Dickinson. There seemed to be much more of a central quad that unified
the camp than Dickinson. I also don't recall having to cross streets at
all, while Dickinson campus was broken up by a few roads. I was in
Buchanan 206, which I recall being at the end of the quad with the
dining hall on the
left. The F&M campus
map
and Lancaster
RealCTY page shows the Marshall-Buchanan building, or Marsh-Puke
as it was called. My RA
was Stephane
Latour.

But certainly what probably made the F&M experience better than
Dickinson was going with Rebecca. It is one thing to go to camp to
reinvent yourself, but its another to have a co-conspirator! Before
CTY Rebecca and I had been friendly competitors but I think CTY is
what actually cemented our friendship.

Unlike at Carlisle where I had to start out meeting people from
scratch, at Lancaster I not only started out knowing Rebecca, but
Rebecca had a group of friends from previous sessions. Her brother
Joel was also attending this session and another J-D middle school
student, Adam G, was also there. Rebecca had promised me to introduce
me to her female friends and let me hang out. Fortunately I don't feel
too guilty about this arrangement as I managed to meet my eventual
girlfriend before Rebecca did and I managed to introduce her to her
boyfriend Gabriel T who was in my class.

Since it was soon to be my birthday, my parents left me with some
helium balloons, which turned out to be pretty useful. One of the
first nights, my roommate and I could hear the girls above us talking,
mostly because of a gap from where the fire sprinkler feed pipe went
between the floors. Once we got their attention, mostly by taping in
the pipe, we then talked through the floor. Mostly we were complaining
to each other about the noise, us to them for talking, them to us for
banging on the pipe. Eventually, we thought of the idea of sending the
balloons up out the window as another way of interacting with the
girls, which seemed to amuse them.

After a few days we started to have a regular group of people hanging
out consisting of various friends, classmates, and hall mates. One I
remember very well was Kira M, who I think was friends with Rebecca
from a previous session and I would go on to see later on a Model
United Nations conferences, as well as her friend Owen B who was part
of our Frisbee group. There were quite a few other nice ladies in the
group including Alice C, Wenchy Wendy (B) with the Whips, and Yoko K.

One afternoon before heading down to dinner, some of us were tossing
Frisbee around at the end of the quad in front of
Marshall-Buchanan. Eventually I ended up talking to some of the girls
and discovered that two of them, Aimee S and Jane W, were the upstairs
neighbors that my roommate and I had been harassing. Uh oh. Well, it
turned out that it was more amusing to discover that we had been
hanging out with the people from upstairs without realizing that any
negative feelings were soon overcome from the novelty of discovering
the identities of our neighbors.

What happened next sort of surprised me. One of the upstairs girls,
Aimee S, apparently had taken a liking to me. I don't recall the exact
progression or time line of things or the role of other actors in the
development of my relationship with Aimee, but I do remember some key
events. Mostly Aimee was not subtle which helped since I often have
been painfully slow to make the first move, as I had been asking a
girl to dance at CTY the previous year and with my middle school and
freshmen year crushes. My first clue was that Aimee liked me is that
she start hanging out with me whenever possible during "mandatory
fun" time, meals, etc., always making sure to sit next to me.

My attitude indicator Swatch that Aimee wore as a symbol of our relationship
From Swatch and Beyond.

Aimee's next step was even less subtle, moving to some hands on
flirting, basically basically turned into a game of taking my
watch. The watch she took was a Swatch which made it cool at the time,
but actually was made to look like a airplane's
attitude
indicator, which made it secretly nerdy which is why I liked it. I
took her watch in return, I recall it being a Swatch as well,
something gray with some red or white highlights on the hands and
numbers. In any case, I'm pretty sure this Swatch swapping is is what
led to hand holding, under the pretense of each of us trying to get
our watches back. In the end, the Swatch swapping ended up being a
symbol like going steady, in leiu of such traditional items such as
class rings and letterman jackets.

The lead up to the Friday dance was very different this time
around. Thursday was my sixteenth birthday and I had never been
happier. I had an actual girlfriend, there was a dance the next
night. However as Friday arrived there was not the usual question of
who to slow dance with, but the big question was would Aimee and I
move beyond hand-holding to kissing. Would this be the night?
Apparently it would, Aimee led me out of the dance early and talked a
bit and found a quiet corner, sitting on a stone wall beneath some
trees behind a dorm. We sat there for a while, I think we could hear
the dance music still off in the distance, and I started to realize
two things: first, time was running out since the dance would end soon
and we'd have to be back in our dorms and, second, I had no idea how
to kiss a girl, just like the year before when I had no idea how to
slow dance. Finally after much inching closer, we finally kissed and
after a second I burst out laughing because I was not ready for the
experience of a French kiss. Clearly Aimee had prior experience with
this sort of thing. After a moment to regain composure and profuse
apologies to Aimee for ruining the moment, we kissed again and this
time I didn't laugh.

Aimee and I spent most of the rest of our free camp time annoying our
friends with constant extreme levels of PDA, including marathon make
out and back rub sessions in the Marshall-Buchanan 'Pit', as the
lounge area between the wings was called. (Apparently the next year in
October
1990 the
Pit was turned into the F&M Children's Center! The horror...)
At one of the weekend off-campus activities we went to go see the
recently released James Bond movie, License to Kill, and we didn't
really see much of the movie, joking afterward "Movie? What
movie?", but staring Timothy Dalton, it apparently wasn't one of
the better Bond flicks anyhow, so we didn't miss much.

Dale, as Adam G was known in CTY circles, had a crowd of CTY friends
having been at Lancaster for a session in 1988. They used to sit
around in the Marshall-Buchanan entryway playing the card
game Mao, many
with towels ready to travel the galaxy, and occasionally wearing
bathrobes, but that might have only been on Thursdays. Because they
were in the entryway, they would often be asked what time it was by
people passing through, to which they had a series of answers such as:

Time to get a watch.

Time to light things on fire.

About the same time it was this time yesterday.

I did learn to play Mao with them (as well as Owen B.) and enjoyed
their love of all things Hitchhiker's as well as general obnoxiousness
to people refusing to wear a watch.

Despite all the fun time with Aimee, I was ostensibly at CTY to take a
class. I had signed up for Computer Science 3 (CS3) "Introduction to
Computer Science and Automata Theory", since I had already done the
programming coursework offered in the CS1 and CS2 classes, one of
which Rebecca had taken a previous year using the "Oh!
Pascal!" book.

Since I was taking a computer class, I had convinced my dad to let me
bring our Sharp laptop (see more on my machines
page) loaded with a copy of Borland Turbo Pascal as well as our
dot matrix printer. Of course, I probably had a copy of Falcon and
Beyond Zork as well, although I don't recall ever having time to play
any games, except to show someone that Beyond Zork was not entirely
text only. This was all contained in his old Air
Force footlocker
so I could keep it locked up and chained to the bed in my room when
not in use.

CS3 turned out to be based on
the Cinderella
Book, aka the "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages,
and Computation" by Hopcroft and Ullman. It was taught by two
TA's, one from CMU and one from MIT's 6.045. This was hard core
computer science theory, not computer programming. There were five of
us that signed up for the class including myself, Gabriel T, David B,
Jacques, and one other. None of us were expecting what a change this
would be from our prior computer programming experiences.

It was common to joke about S&M at F&M. Well, the 5 of us
CS3 students certainly felt that we were masochists and our TAs
sadists. When I later took this class in my junior year at MIT, it was
after taking such prerequisites as 18.063 Discrete Mathematics and
18.01 Calculus. At least I was not alone in being overwhelmed, the TAs
eventually lowered the bar on the homework difficulty. During class,
they changed to only covering a lot of material at a high level, only
got into selected details. For my final project I originally started
writing a program to construct the finite automata from a regular
expression but in the end just performed the construction proof in
class. All of this gave me a very negative impression of computer
science as a major. It was after this that I would shift my focus back
to aero-astro, which would have a major impact on college selections
the following year.

One thing I did learn how to do that summer was juggle. Gabriel T from
CS3 knew how to do some basic juggling and was working on improving
his own skills during while hanging out on the quad. I had a red,
white, and blue stripped
Koosh
named Trillian
that I used along with some other items while learning to juggle two
balls and then three balls. I'm a bit rusty now, but I could do okay
though most of high school, which was kind of neat.

Ironically I'm not sure it was as hard to leave camp this year as the
last. This year I had few regrets. Sure CS3 had become sort of a cruel
joke but that was more than made up by my time with Aimee, Rebecca,
Adam, Kira, etc. I had a lot of fun hanging out, playing Frisbee,
learning Mao, and being with Aimee. Rebecca had an excellent picture
of Aimee and I in front of Marshall-Buchanan at the end of camp where
I am just smiling and happy even though Aimee's expression makes it
clear that she not looking forward to camp being over.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly missed camp, especially Aimee. One
thing that made it a little easier was talking to and hanging out with
Rebecca during the rest of the summer. We would often talk about camp
and share from letters we received from our friends. A few times we
went down to a park on Lydon Road along the old Erie Canal and wrote
letters together to camp friends. I think it really helped to have
someone that was there as witness that I could reminisce with.

After getting back from camp I, I got my driver's permit. That evening
my mom took me up to the high school to drive our
1976 Dodge
Aspen SE station wagon around the parking lot. The next day my dad
had me drive our newer
1989 Dodge
Dynasty to Buffalo, NY, which was quite a change from the high
school parking lot.

In fact, after I got my permit, my parents pretty much had me drive
them everywhere they went. However, my dad didn't want me to get my
driver's license until I finished a driver's education class to
minimize the car insurance costs. Instead, he said I could work on
getting my pilot's certificate in the meanwhile. On 16 August 1989 I got
Medical Certificate 3rd class and Student Pilot Certificate after a
medical exam from Dr. Grossman, who coincidentally lived on Woodberry
Lane near my house. The exam was upstairs in the old SAIR hanger where
I would also take my private pilot lessons.

Picture of SAIR hanger
Note the old control tower sticking up in the rear
From Panoramio.

The next week we headed out to Detroit, Michigan,
for IJCAI-89 which
was taking place from August 20 to 26. I took a tutorial entitled
"Expert Systems for Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided
Manufacturing". While we were there, we parked at the summer cottage
on Lake St Clair in Puce, Ontario, that belonged to our family friends
the M's. Jamie M was my age and we had fun listening to music,
swimming in the lake. One day we all rented a boat and I tried to
water ski but only managed to get up on a kneeboard. While we were
there my family drove up to Ann Arbor to tour the University of
Michigan since it was on my short list for college applications. We
also went to visit
the Henry Ford
Museum and Greenfield Village in Detroit which Jamie came along
for. I remember that Jamie and I bought one of every flavor of stick
candy which was way too much for Jamie, Rachael, and I to consume. I
remember that Jamie wanted to ride the carousel and that I wanted to
ride the steam train and that really in the end that the carousel was
probably more entertaining.

First period was Mrs. Reed's precalculus class. I had read the book
the previous year as part of my preparation for the math contest so I
didn't find the material particularly challenging. Chris S was in the
class with me.

Second period was for senior science electives, which I took even
though I was a junior. They each were one quarter long so you could
take four per year. First quarter I took electronics with Mr. Wilson,
who was the physics teacher and head of the science department. We
built a working radio receiver after learning all the fundamentals of
how it worked. Second quarter I took astronomy, also with
Mr. Wilson. We learned there was a secret stairway to the roof of the
school and went up their to look at sunspots. Third quarter was
quantitative analysis with chemistry teacher Mr. Polichemi. As the
name suggests, this was a very mathematically oriented class were I
learned a lot about the significance of orders of magnitude and how to
properly use my scientific calculator. The fourth quarter was the
more fun qualitative analysis chemistry class taught by Mr. Stopher. We
had fun with titration, magnetically mixed beakers, Bunsen burners, and
random chemicals. In the end we used our lab skills to follow a
decision tree procedure to identify an unknown chemical
substance. Senior Chris M from tech theater was in these two chemistry
electives with me.

Third and fourth period were the humanities honors program, as it had
been the previous year. This year I was in class with Rebecca D,
Stephen S, Scott S, Lisa W, and Shelley B. Third period was US history
with Mr. Monterosso, who it turned out was a very big film buff. What
stuck with me most was been the influence supreme court cases we
learned about. Fourth period was Mrs. Adams for English. We read a
range of American novels to complement US history
including The
Scarlet
Letter, All
Quiet on the Western
Front, Of
Mice and
Men, The
Catcher in the Rye. We had to do public readings occasionally and
I remember a particularly passionate one by Shelley B from Of Mice and
Men which shocked us all because we couldn't really picture the strong
language coming from someone who usually was such a quiet girl. The
humanities festival seemed significantly larger scale this year, and
involved us transforming the library into New York City. With my new
found set construction experience, I helped build an entrance way that
would simulate people entering as if from a subway station. The class
put together an issue of the New Yorker as part of the project as
well.

05-06 period was gym followed by 7th period lunch. Junior and senior
year we only had gym twice a week and had a greater choice in what to
do. Some of my favorite activities were archery, indoor hockey,
badminton, and tennis. I started eating lunch outside the backstage
door with a number of other people from musical theater, but mostly
because Rebecca was there.

For the first half of the year, eighth period was my architecture
class with Mr. DeOrio. After learning some basics about architectural
plans and residential design, we each did our own housing design
projects. I did something based on our Woodside Road house, although
slightly simplified in some of the details. I only took the class one
time so I didn't do any architectural models like other kids that were
taking it additional times like Mike V, who I remember working in the
back on his three dimensional house model.

For the second half of the year, eighth period was an independent
study class with Mr. Jerauld. I learned dBase IV programming. The
project was to do a database to track statistics for a car racing
league. Mr. Jerauld had some idea that this might be something of
value to an actual local league but I never focused that hard on
it. Apparently dBase IV was a disaster compared to its predecessors,
ranking
#10 on PC World's list of The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time,
but fortunately I didn't run into any problems.

Ninth period was Mrs. Quinn for honors biology. I was lab partners
again with Chris S and sat with him at a shared desk behind Rich S and
Mike V. I really enjoyed biology, both the hands on experimentation
with increasing complex creations such as parameciums, hydras, and
frogs as well as the more textbook material on
the Krebs
cycle and DNA. One thing that has always stuck with me was
the Miller-Urey
experiment, the classic experiment that explained how amino acid
building blocks of life could have been generated from the more
primitive substances of water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen simply
due to effects of lightning. It impressed me so much that some of us,
including Stephen S, thought about trying to reproduce the results as
part of a science fair experiment but in the end we had other things
to do.

Tenth period was Mrs. Sorkin for AP Spanish Language. I was
accompanied by Stephen S, Jennifer T, and Kim K. In the end, I'm not
sure any of us did very well on the AP exam, although I at least got a
2 and not a 1.

Activities Junior Year

My main new activity junior year
was Science Olympiad. Dr. Daley has
been involved with the regional Science Olympiad organization but J-D
had not had an organized team before. Although we threw together a
team to participate in the quiz bowl type events on Saint Patrick's
Day sophomore year (see Mr. Daley's comment in
Town
Talk), we hadn't participated in the events that required advanced
preparation.

I did start cutting back on activities junior year. Donna C continued
with Junior Achievement, get elected as president and dragging me in
as VP of Marketing, but I started losing interest after our dismal
sophomore year experience. I also dropped out of mock trial, which I
really had faded out of sophomore year. I also disappeared from TARS,
although it never was a very regular activity. I did stick with my
favorite activities of math team and PAC.

I was an officer in PAC so my involvement naturally increased. I now
attending officer meetings at president Samina C's house, which was
over near my old Michaels Drive house. Peter E use to give me rides to
the meetings. He was vice-president and lived across Maple Drive from
our current Woodside Road house. He had his own Saab bought with money
earned from his stock market activities. This was before he tired of
the Saab and upgraded to an Audi senior year.

One other new activity that I started sometime junior year was
Civil Air
Patrol (CAP). Donna C had joined along with a friend of hers from
Marcelles Diane E, and Diane's brother Pete. I was pretty excited
about CAP, which a civilian auxiliary to the US Air Force. I had met
some adult members of CAP at SAIR during my private pilot training and
they were always interesting and fun to talk to. They encouraged me to
get involved in CAP. However, the student CAP was very different than
the adult CAP. It was much more like the boy scouts on steroids with
military discipline. Most of the weekly activities, which were at the
armory in downtown Syracuse, consisted of PT (physical training),
uniform inspections, and marching. Bonus activities consisted of guard
duty. Although I didn't have trouble with the written aerospace and
even leadership tests, the student leadership was not impressed by
such book learning and I felt my advancement through the ranks was
limited and I didn't reach far beyond Cadet Airman . Most of the
student sergeants seemed mostly interested in bossing around the
airman rather than doing anything constructive. I do think that my
time in CAP was worthwhile, mostly because I think it gave me an
appreciation of what my father went through in terms of wearing the US
Air Force uniform, leaning to drill, PT, etc. Certainly it was not at
the same level as he went through at the US Air Force Academy, which I
can only imagine was more intense.

Life Junior Year

Bridget L was a new kid in school my junior year. She was a sophomore
and I remember being introduce to her by someone I knew that was
showing her around the school, which might have been one of those
non-class days where you meet with guidance counselors and the like.
Rich B was another new kid in school that I became friends with junior
year. He was a junior that lived not far from Scott S. He didn't stay
long, I think he may have even left soon after the new year, but we
certainly had a lot of fun with he while he was around.

Adam G from CTY also started high school my junior year. He even was
briefly in my precalculus class and although he dropped back to
Course III, it was cool to be in a bunch of activities with him. Adam
also joined the new Science Olympiad team. Other members of the team
were mostly people I knew from math team and PAC, but there were a few
people I didn't know as well such as sophomore Sarah N.

I certainly recognized Sarah from around school. She was in the school
orchestra so had played in the Music Man the previous year. But
Science Olympiad was the first time I remember really talking to her
and pretty soon afterward I had a crush on her. My usual modus
operandi was to call a girl I liked a few times, usually starting
with some pretext about looking for some information on a homework
assignment, eventually working up to inviting them to some party. I'm
not sure what pretext I used as I usually would call to ask about some
classwork but since we were in different grades, we didn't have any
classes in common. Fortunately, during the call, I remember one my
parents came to my room to tell me there was a segment on some TV show
about Science Olympiad, so I turned that on, which gave us something
in common to talk about for a while. Our talk that night seemed to go
well and before long I moved on to part two of my M.O. by inviting her
to a party at Rich B's house.

The party itself was pretty low key. I remember sitting around Rich's
living room listening to music, probably we rented a movie and had
some drinks and snacks as well. I don't quite remember who was there
but it certainly included Rich, Scott, Sarah, and myself as well as
number of the other usual suspects. I'm pretty sure Sarah's friend
Rachel B was there as well, and I think there was some brief
relationship between Rich and Rachel around this time. Curiously, I
don't remember any parental units around, which was pretty rare for
one of our parties.

I remember sitting next to Sarah on the floor when we heard a bunch of
giggling and conspiratorial whispering. Apparently people there was a
plot excluding Sarah and I afoot. Sure enough, at the start of the next
song everyone got up and left the room, with a number of them even
going outside. The song that happened to come on next was Madonna's
"Crazy For You" which would thereafter become our song. While
our friends were gone, Sarah and I talked about our friends conspiracy
to get us alone and moved from just sitting extremely close to
holding hands to the amusement of our friends when they returned.

The home coming dance was coming up in a week or two so I asked Sarah
to go with me and she said yes. It was the first time I asked a girl
out on an actual premeditated date. I remember telling my mom that I
was going to the dance and she asked me if I was going with someone
and surprised when I did not immediately answer no. I had gone to a
dance or two freshmen year but never with someone.

Most of my time leading up to the dance was worrying about a possible
first kiss. However, on the afternoon before I flew for the first time
with my instructor Dave Conklin. My one hour introductory flight was
in Piper
PA-38-112 Tomahawk with registration
number N23913. I
got to take off
from Syracuse
Hancock International Airport It was quite an exciting to go my
first flight to my first date!

The dance was on Friday, 13 October 1989. Although I remember that it
was in the main gym at the high school like most dances, I forget most
of the other details about the dance. For example, I don't know if we
arrived separately or my parents and I drove to pick her up. I don't
remember most of the actual dancing, although there certainly was
that. I do remember two things. The first is that as usual I
procrastinated making a move to kiss the girl. The second was that as
we were slowly leaning in and finally about to kiss at the end of the
last dance, Assistant Principal Brinkerhoff threw on all the lights in
the gym which startled us and ruined the moment and we were all soon
ushered out of the gym. We would not be having our first kiss that
night.

However, the weekend was not over yet. Saturday morning we went to the
actual homecoming game. It was pretty cold as it was already
October. While I probably had my arm around Sarah for some mutual
warmth, I didn't try to kiss her because a priest from my church, who
knew me from confirmation classes and yet somehow always called me
Chris, was sitting next to us in the stands. That was okay, the
football game didn't seem like the right time to kiss anyway.

To Be Scanned

Picture of Sarah and I with the priest in the stands at the homecoming game.
From Hilltop Echoes 1990, page 13.

Later in the afternoon we went to see the movie "Look Who's
Talking" at the Fayetteville Mall. I remember the opening scene
being a bit awkward as it featured an animation of eager sperm
competing to impregnate an egg. After that it did settle into being a
amusing romantic comedy. At some point I finally made my move to kiss
Sarah only to forget my own experience with Aimee and try a French
kiss which she was not expecting. In the end, she didn't seem to mind
and afterward we went to
the Friendly's
at the mall, where we both ordered Reese's Peanut Butter Cup
Sundaes. See how much we had in common!

Soon after my homecoming weekend with Sarah, I went away for a
confirmation class retreat that included Scott S and Kim K. Although I
had just started dating Sarah, I had spent the previous year with a
crush on Kim while she had been dating Alex V. However, Scott had
developed his own feelings for Kim in the meanwhile. He was pretty
annoyed with me for sitting next to her on the bus on the way back
from the retreat but it really helped bring a close to my crush on
Kim. We talked about her and Alex, me and her, me and Sarah, and
Scott. It was very cathartic, letting me talk about the past year, my
new relationship with Sarah, and to put in a good word or two for
Scott. It wasn't too long until they were dating as well.

My confirmation was on 29 October 1989. It seemed like every year they
kept pushing back the age of confirmation in the parishes I was in
that I really didn't believe it would finally be over. The last year
they started making us go to extra evening confirmation classes as
well, I remember Kim was in my group for that. We had to pick
confirmation names. Scott picked David, making his full name Scott
Michael David S. I liked David too but was frustrated that it was
already my middle name. In the end, I wondered, why did it have to be
different? So I stood up and told the Bishop Frank Harrison to confirm
me as Brian David David Carlstrom.

The next day my sister Rachael was baptized by Father Robert Kelly. I
was the godfather and my cousin Christina D was the godmother. As
Christina was in town, she actually was also my confirmation sponsor,
a last minute sidelining of Mr. McGowan who was someone in our parish
from Eden Roc on my old paper route.

Another early dating event for Sarah and I was a Halloween Party at
Donna C's house, the same weekend as my confirmation. We went as a
themed couple, with myself as a pilot, probably wearing my father's
old flight suit and Sarah as a stewardess. I recall being in the
garage at least for part of the party, which was unusual since I
remember being in Donna's living room and dining room for most events
at her house. Lisa's USY friend Erika R was also there as well as the
usual suspects.

Sarah's and my life continued to intertwine. She joined math team. She
joined PAC along with her friends Rachel B and Sara D, little sister
of Rebecca's friend Jessica D. My social circle expanded to include
her friends, for example, I remember early on going to a party at
Rachel B's house and remember hanging out with Rachel and her new post
Rich B boyfriend, Mark K, while they were waiting for after school
buses. Over time I also got to know many of her friends better, many
of which were siblings of my own classmates. Besides Sara D, who I
mentioned was the little sister of Jessica D, there was Suki K, little
sister of Kim K, and Sara T, little sister of Sasie T. Sarah also
became friends with new student Bridget L, who was with her in
orchestra in addition to honors classes, PAC, and Science Olympiad.

Sarah's birthday was coming up pretty quickly. It was actually on the
first Friday of the Hilton MUN conference which we were both going
to. Given that we wouldn't be going to regular school Friday, I was
able to get her mom to agree to let me have a birthday party for her
on Thursday night. Even more, it was a surprise party in the sense
that she was not expecting anyone to be at my house besides my
family. Instead she arrived to find not only her friends from J-D but
also a friend from her old apartment complex that she had mentioned to
me during our phone conversations. For this first special occasion, I
gave her a silver bracelet I had bought at the Service Merchandise
that used to be down at the end of Maple Dr where the new larger
Wegman's is now. The bracelet was the first time I ever purchased
jewelry for a girl and turned out to be a pretty good gift, as Sarah
wore it not only while we were dating, but even on occasion after we
broke up.

The Hilton trip was more fun than usual with Sarah to keep me company
on the ride there. It was good to see Kira M from CTY, I believe she
was in committee with Rebecca D. Sarah and I didn't have much time
alone at the conference being busy with our separate committees and
not having much time between getting of the bus to the hotel before
having to be in our separate rooms. The ride home was the best part of
the weekend when we finally had some quiet time for just the two of us
in the back of the bus on the way home.

My second student pilot flight was the Wednesday after the Hilton MUN
trip, 22 November 1989. However after that my flight training lapsed
until around the day after my birthday the following summer when I
also started classes for the written pilot exam, which I passed junior
year.

Sometime in the fall of junior year I took the PSAT exam. It was not
very stressful for me given that I had been taking the SATs for years,
but it was necessary since it also served as the National Merit
Scholarship Qualifying Test. Unfortunately, I didn't do well enough to
win a merit scholarship, although I received a Letter of Commendation
from the National Merit Scholarship Program. Rebecca D aced the exam
with a perfect score on verbal and math.

Christmas

I original bought a ring for Sarah for Christmas to match the bracelet
I had given her from her birthday. My mom refused to let me give it to
her because of the symbolic nature of giving a girl a ring, so I was
forced to return it. In the end I bought Sarah the cassette tape of
the New
Kids on the Block Christmas album, which she had specifically
requested. I've always been amused that Sarah liked Christmas music
even though she was Jewish. In return Sarah gave me a cassette single
tape of the
song Lambada
as well as a mix tape which contained some music from
the Fine
Young Cannibals among some other then popular music.

In addition to the New Kids album, Scott and I also pulled an all
nighter in the winter cold outside Shoppingtown to get Billy Joel
Storm Front concert tickets for us and Sarah and Kim. The concert was
on February 2 at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY.

Scott and I also exchanged presents. Scott gave me a Radio Shack
DUOFONE-166 speakerphone with 32 speed dials
(catalog
number 43-604, page 147) since I was such a heavy phone user. I got
him a mini Walkman-type cassette player. I don't know what happened to
his cassette player but I still use the phone he gave me in my office.

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall "fell". We were in West Germany
soon afterward, I believe on Christmas break, and looking for some
place to go. I suggested going to Berlin. My dad had to think about
it, it a little strange at first for retired US colonel to think about
driving through East Germany, but in the end he threw caution to the
wind and we were off. We entered the DDR
through Hirschberg,
which was one of the approved
border
crossings to West Berlin. We then started a rather bleak trek
across the East German autobahn. Everything just seemed so gray and
lifeless compared to West Germany. Eventually we arrived to West
Berlin
through Checkpoint
Bravo between Drewitz in DDR
and
Dreilinden in BRD.

In West Berlin we went to see the wall at
the
Brandenburg Gate. People covered the top of the wall to get their
picture taken. People had started hacking pieces off the wall chisels
and hammers. There was a opening on the right hand side where there
was some East German guards making an effort to regulate, although not
restrict travel through the gate. Occasionally they would futile yell
at people to get off the wall. I collected a few wall fragments as a
souvenir for myself, which are currently at my parents house.

We also went to see the old official crossing between East and West
Berlin,
Checkpoint
Charlie. We also visited the nearby
Checkpoint
Charlie Museum. Probably the strangest thing I saw were the Soviet
soldiers guarding
the
Tiergarten Soviet War Memorial. Although located it West Berlin,
just west of the Brandenburg Gate, the Soviet soldiers would come over
from East Berlin to serve as an ever present honor guard at the
memorial. Apparently the Soviet soldiers no longer guard the memorial,
which is now maintained by the city of Berlin.

After our visit to Berlin, my father observed that we had been from
the beaches of Normandy to Berlin in two trips to Europe that year. We
certainly covered quite a lot of World War II history.

1990

The Billy Joel concert at the Carrier Dome was great. It was my first
rock concert. I remember we sat on the right hand side of the Carrier
Dome facing the stage, the seats were not too bad. When I say we sat
there, I should say we stood there, since we were on our feet for
almost the entire performance. We got cool, but expensive, T-shirts to
commemorate the experience that I probably gave to my sister along
with all my other cool T-shirts after I graduated from college.

By the time Valentine's Day rolled around, my bank account was
empty. Sarah and I went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant in
Fayetteville for Valentine's day abut we had to go dutch on the
check. Sarah and I never really went out much anyway. Most of our time
alone was spent in the basement of her mother's and stepfathers's
house on Thomas Road, not far from my old Michaels Drive house. There
was a TV and we occasionally might watch a movie, but most of the time
we just played games. One game we played a lot was the card
game Spit. We
also used to play Trivial Pursuit, but often in just degenerated into
each other just reading the questions to each other out of nerdy
curiosity. Of course being in the basement gave us the opportunity for
other teenage dating activities, but those were mostly kept in check
my Sarah's mom, who always took advantage of doing the laundry to
come downstairs at very irregular intervals.

The NAIMUN conference was right after Valentine's Day. In previous
years I had used my free time for trips for political tourism to the
OAS or White House. However, this year I went to Silver Spring to see
my old girlfriend Aimee S. We had planned to see each other when I was
down for NAIMUN since we had parted the previous summer. We had never
formerly broken up but had stayed in occasional letter and phone
contact. I hadn't told her about Sarah, mostly I just talked about
what was up with Rebecca and other CTYers we had heard from.

On Thursday I rode the red line out to Silver Spring, Maryland, with
some apprehension about what was going to happen. She and her mom
picked me up at the station and we drove home to her house. She was
playing hooky from school to see me since my only free time was during
the day. We went down to the family room in her basement to
watch
Adventures in Babysitting. Now if I wasn't feeling awkward enough
about secretly hanging out with my ex-girlfriend, now I was watching a
movie where the female lead is being cheated on by her boyfriend and
ends up babysitting a girl named Sara. My visit didn't last too
long. I think we took a break from the movie to have some lunch
upstairs and before I knew it I was back on a Metro to DC. Our
sporadic communication decreased after that until it eventually
stopped. I was too old to be returning to CTY and we probably would
have little occasion to see each other in the future. Indeed, I never
saw Aimee in person again.

If that wasn't enough extracurricular drama for one trip, I had also
made plans to go see my friend Jaime M. Scott accompanied me on this
escapade out to suburbs of Virginia. Either Jaime or one of her
friends must have had a car and a license because I don't remember
seeing her parents that day. Scott and I just hung out with Jaime and
some of her friends. We were at her school in the afternoon then went
somewhere to grab something to eat. I think we had talked about going
to a dance at her school but then decided that would be lame.

I probably forget most of what happened on our visit to Jaime because
of the storm we walked into when we came back to the conference. We
had skipped out on the usually boring keynote speaker
dinner. Unfortunately that year they someone of note that actually had
a security detail of some kind. We had been warned to make sure to
have our conference ID with us since they would be security people
making sure people were on the list to attend the dinner.

Scott and I had never thought it would be a big deal to skip out on
the dinner. Certainly we generally were not checked up on throughout
the day and there certainly were times where we were permitted to
leave the conference unchaperoned. However, apparently when we didn't
show up for the dinner, our trip chaperon, gym teacher Mr. Santangelo,
was informed. When another J-D student saw us upon our return, we were
warned that we were in trouble and that Mr. Santangelo was looking for
us. Eventually he caught up with us in our room where we were probably
getting ready for some evening social function of our own, perhaps the
delegate dance.

We were confined to our rooms for the evening while they figured out
what to do with us. I felt bewildered because I still didn't know what
I had done wrong. My parents knew I was going to see my family friend
Jaime. Indeed, my parents had listed her parents as my emergency
contact. If they had actually tried to contact my parents or my
emergency contact, they would have known where I was.

In the end, nothing much happened to us on the trip. When we returned,
Mr. Monterosso was given the job of delivering our punishment which
turned out to not be at all what I expected. I expected the usual
punishment of some number of days of detention. Instead Scott and I
were barred from holding any PAC office our senior year, quiet a
strange punishment from my US History teacher and advocate of democrat
process in international relations. Scott and I had planned to seek
appointed roles as PAC News editors, but it was not to be. The whole
experience left me feeling very awkward around Mr. Monterosso, a
teacher I had to see every day in class, and one that I had been one
of my favorites for three years.

That year our high school basketball team was on fire. Scott, Dave,
and Peter were in the pep band and I would often sit with them at the
home games. These games became such big events that they even had a
few with dances after them. Some people I knew on the team were Andy
C, with the locker next to mine, and Matt W, Scott's "friend" from
math class. The star of the team that year was Bernard B who, as
of 2009, still holds
the the
record for the most points scored in a single game for New York
State, among other records. Bernard went on to play college ball
at St. Josephs, where he set a number of team records, but did not
continue on to professional play.

One one rare outing to Shoppingtown Mall, Sarah and I stopped by the
lower level McDonalds for a snack. This is when she introduced me to
dunking french fries in chocolate milk shakes. At first I was a bit
revolted to think about it, but it did taste pretty good, and now its
something I do whenever I have the occasion. Later on I learned that
the shake has more salt that the fries, which didn't end up surprising
me.

For spring break my family
traveled Space-A
to Europe. After catching a hop to Germany on a big cargo plane, we
ended up catching a small executive-style plane
to Hellenikon
Air Base in Athens. My mom was a little concerned about the
security situation, since she remembered attacks a number of terror
attacks associated with the airport. In Athens we went and saw some
sights around Athens such as the Parthenon. However, we spent a fair
amount of time in our room, which was a suite with a beautiful view
over the sea. Unfortunately, I spent much of this time working on my
humanities term paper for Mr. Monterosso, which was due immediately
after spring break. I had lugged my
dad's Sharp laptop which
basically filed my whole backpack to type my paper. I did play hooky
one day and watched the John Cusack
movie The Sure
Thing which was part of a library of movies along with a VCR in
the suite. One negative experience was ordering a salad for dinner one
evening, only to find out a Greek salad consisted of a bowl of
tomatoes and cucumbers, neither of which I would eat at the time.

We had quite a bit of trouble finding a flight back from
Athens. First, there was bad weather on the east coast that canceled
many flights. After that, the backlog of passengers was pretty long
and with my dad as a retiree, we were the lowest priority for a
space. Eventually, we tried a trick to get some seats. On April 23rd
we took a flight
to Incirlik
Air Base in Turkey knowing the plane would then turn around and
come back west and we hoped there would be fewer people waiting. The
gamble paid off and we got out of Turkey almost as quickly as we
arrived. In fact, the Turkish immigration officer was a bit
disconcerted that we were leaving so soon after our arrival. We flew
back to the US
via NAS
Sigonella, Italy, but since we were booked through to the US, we
couldn't be bumped even with the stop over. We arrived back in the US
on April 24th. The upside of our travel delays was that I had a few
more days to work on my term paper. When I did end up back at school
and turned in my term paper, Mr. Monterosso asked me to give my
presentation on term paper, something I had completely forgotten about
and was unprepared for. Fortunately, he gave me a deferral to the next
day so I wouldn't have to just wing it.

Junior year's musical
was Guys and
Dolls and was definitely my favorite musical of the all the
productions I have ever been involved in. This year I was sound
director and Adam L was lighting director. Because Adam L also played
the role of Big Julie in the show, we were lucky to have three other
people on lighting crew including Steve W, Stephen S, and Adam G,
allowing us to always have someone to run the board as well as to
cover the two spot lights. Sarah played the violin in the orchestra,
although the rarely rehearsed with us until near the end, so I didn't
see her much during my work on the show. Fortunately Sarah never
discovered that one of the "responsibilities" of sound director was
helping actresses put on their wireless microphones. One girl had to
wear the the microphone bodypack strapped to her leg under her skirt
and occasionally I had to change the batteries during the performance
while she was still in costume.

At some point Adam G's house became the place to be, I'm guessing it
was after he got to know a lot more upperclassman through his work on
the show. If there were no other scheduled birthday parties or special
events going on, there was almost assuredly a gathering at Adam's
house. Adam's basement was the perfect teen hangout with a large TV
with a huge movie library, a pool table, snacks and soft drinks, and
parents who stayed upstairs, but were always home to satisfy other
parents. This is where I got to know Pete S, Adam's lifelong friend
who I also used to see in Boston when Adam was at MIT, and now is in
Chicago with Adam.

Sometime before the end of the school year, Rebecca developed a thing
for Adam. They started dating which ended up lasting through the
summer, even with Adam's time at CTY.

The middle school musical was held in the high school
auditorium. Stephen S and I got paid to do lighting work for the
show. As an extra bonus, Sarah came and visited me in the lighting
booth and we got to experiment with the strange barber shop like chair
that was in front of the lighting board, something that I previously
had seen demonstrated when I walked in on Adam L and Samantha M. I
also got paid one time to run lights for an anti-drug rock
concert. This was even during school hours, so I got paid by school to
miss school. It was crazy fun to because we got to do all sorts of
crazy things with the auditorium and spot lights which we would never
do during the typical rehearsed theater production. Probably the best
gig I ever had was doing lights and sound for an Indian cultural
festival one Saturday. Not only did we get paid an above normal rate,
something crazy like $20 an hour, the people running the show also
gave a big tip, not realizing that we were already getting paid higher
than normal rates. I also did some other free work such working on
sound for the high school Cabaret show junior and senior year.

This years first organized trip to Science Olympiad brought some
rewards. My main focus was to build a vehicle powered by a mousetrap
the farthest distance possible. My father and I cooked up something
mostly out of my Expert Builder LEGO and a few odds and ends. We
showed up to face off against teams with carefully constructed custom
vehicles. We did okay against these bigger monsters, which turned out
to share our design of having a lever arm attached to the mousetrap
slowly unwind a string wrapped around an axle. Unfortunately their
larger size meant longer lever arms and therefore more pull. We were
smaller and perhaps lighter, which helped us a bit, since we could
coast after unwinding. I believe we got fourth place, but we were not
at all close to the first place winner, who I believe traveled the
entire length of the gym in which we were setup to do our
trials. Apparently I also competed in some biology event, receiving a
certificate in that as well.

In addition to attending MUN conferences, this year PAC actually
managed to host two of its own at the high school. The first was a
small affair in November, referred to as MiniMUN, which I pronounced
Min-I-MUN, not Min-E-MUN, to go along with our take on pronouncing
CNYMUN as Sin-I-MUN instead of like the word cinnamon, which was the
official F-M pronunciation. This was a single day affair, perhaps only
a single afternoon, with only local schools such as ESM and F-M
invited. Later in the year in May we hosted was I believe to be the
first UNYMUN which while still one day, was larger scale and involved
more schools. So don't let those people running the
current UNYMUN let you think this
was something new for the 21st century. And yes, I pronounced it
U-NI-MUN, not Uni-MUN.

On May 3rd I was inducted into the Nation Honor Society (NHS). There
was a ceremony at the high school led my Samina C, president of the
outgoing senior class NHS, as well as Mrs. Quinn, who was the NHS
faculty adviser. I had been quite surprised in the application process
how much emphasis there was on community service, not just academic
achievement. Suddenly I appreciated all the volunteer work I had done
with my mom at the church such as sorting and packing groceries for
donations as well as work I had done as part of the confirmation
program such as working at the Dorthday Day House emergency shelter
for women, etc.

The big end of year event was the Junior prom on 12 May 1990. When I
formally asked Sarah to be my date, she wanted to know what she should
wear. I immediately responded a short, strapless black dress. Ariel B
rented a limo which we crammed four couples into including myself and
Sarah, Scott and Kim, Ariel and his date, and Stephen S and his date
Shin-Pei T. Before the prom we had dinner reservations at Decker's
Veal and Vintage. We arrived in our limo to find that there were
people picking the restaurant for serving veal. The protesters felt
sorry for us and let us through after we promised not to have any
veal. Instead Ariel tried to gross us all out by ordering
escargot. After dinner, we returned to the fabulous night spot of the
high school gym, where at least the theme of "Forever Young"
was appealing, even if the locale was not.

Scott S picking up Kim K for the junior prom.
Kim K, her father, Carrie S, Scott S, ?, ?, Rose S, ?.
I have to think that I'm there somewhere behind the camera in the limo.
From Scott.

The end of the year J-D Awards were on 7 June 1990. My pickings were
pretty slim this year, only receiving an Architecture award from
Mr. DeOrio. I blame listening to Christian T's advice from the end of
sophomore year.

One final end of year memory came courtesy of Jennifer P, a graduating
senior that was a friend of Meg K, older sister of Kim and Suki. She
was taking on of Mr. Jerauld's classes during my independent study
period. When Scott found out, he was a little surprised that this
attractive upper classman would even talk to me. Honestly, something
about having a significant other makes it both easier to talk to the
opposite sex as well as for them to talk to you. Near the end of the
year she was listening
to You
Can Leave Your Hat On on her walkman, which she thought I would
find amusing and insisted on playing for me. When I told Scott this,
he was just slack-jawed, thinking back to Kim Bassinger's scene in the
movie 9 1/2
Weeks. I think to make it worse for Scott to believe, Jennifer
even wore a cute little hat with some short skirt and blouse outfit,
but perhaps that is just memory playing tricks on me.

Summer 1990

During the summer I took an economics class through the Lemoyne
College Summer Scholar Program economics class with Stephen, Peter,
and Dave. This got us out of having to take the course senior year,
leaving more time for senioritis activities.

One of the highlights of the summer was the Montauk Marine Biology
trip. Scott, Donna, and Stephen had gone the previous year and had a
lot of fun. Sarah, Dave Y, and Steve S went as well. It was a fairly
long bus ride from Syracuse to Montauk at the end of Long Island and,
unlike NAIMUN trips where we had chartered a nice bus, we were all
packed in a traditional yellow school bus. We were followed by a
smaller bus driven by our biology teacher, Mrs. Quinn. Sarah and I sat
in the last row of the bus on the right, with Dave across from us. We
could see Mrs. Quinn following behind us and we dubbed her "Quicky
Quinn" for some of her surprising driving.

Our activities were based out
of
Theodore Roosevelt County Park during our week in Montauk. Many of
the activities were in Third House, which was head quarters of Camp
Wikoff where Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders were quarantined
after the Spanish-American War. We stayed in small cabins behind Third
House. Dave and I were roommates in one room of our cabin, along with
two other boys in another room. With beds and running water including
a shower, we weren't exactly roughing it.

Aerial View of Third House showing park cabins to the north.
Dave and I were in the cabin closest to the house in the west of the road.

We did a number of diverse activities during our week at Montauk. One
day we went to the beach and collected clams, which later our became
clam chowder for dinner. We also spent time looking at creatures in
tidal pools such as the usual starfish. We went whale watching and did
manage to see a number of whales. During our cruise Sarah was doped up
on Dramamine
to avoid seasickness, which fortunately didn't turn out to be a
problem. One afternoon we had just a fun beach day and Sarah was
jealous of the attention Dave and I paid to some of the other girls in
their swimsuits, in particular of redhead that was part of our
group. Mostly it was just me being a wingman to Dave's interest in
Colby and Stephanie. We also toured the
historic
Montauk Lighthouse. The previous year Scott and Donna had said
that a large group of students had snuck out at night to walk to the
lighthouse at night. Knowing we would never hear the end of it from
Scott if we didn't attempt a similar expedition, Dave and I and a
fairly large group of other students walked out the three miles down
Route 27 to the lighthouse. The next day we berated the J-D girls,
including Sarah, for laming out and not joining us. Sarah did sneak
into our cabin for a while one night to make up for her earlier.

I made a lot of progress on my private pilot certificate during the
summer. I took a ground school course to help prepare for the written
exam which can from July 21st through October 6th. It covered material
such as found in the the FAA's now
online Airplane
Flying Handbook.

I also put in a fair amount of flight time as well to prepare for my
first solo flight. One time while climbing out of Syracuse toward
Oswego in the north, I found that my seat was not quite adjusted how I
usually like and I thought I'd make a quick adjustment. The seat
adjustment on the plane was like that of many cars, a simple lever
under the front edge allows you to slide the seat back and
forth. Unfortunately, if you are doing this while climbing in an
airplane, gravity will pull the seat back quickly, and you along with
it. If you are the pilot and holding onto the control yoke, it also
has the effect of having you pull back on the yoke and increasing the
rate of climb which can lead to a stall. Fortunately when this
happened to me, after a second I quickly realized I should let go of
the yoke, which caused the plane to level off, and allowed me to avoid
the stall, adjust my seat, and then resume my climb. My instructor
pilot was very amused at this sitting in the right seat laughing at me
after I had recovered.
(Apparently I'm not the only one to make this mistake...
GizmodoCNN)

Finally, on 31 August 1990, I flew my
first solo flight doing touch-and-goes on runway 24
at Oswego
County Airport in
a Cessna
152. During one of my trips through the pattern and indicator
light came on which required me to recycle the magnetos. The procedure
was something my instructor had drilled into me but yet I had never
seen in my own experience. I ended up doing a full stop landing to
confer with him about the indicator light before continuing to do more
touch-and-go landings. My solo flight time was half of an hour that
day, after around 24 hours of total flight time. I ended up reflecting
on my solo flight experiences in MIT essay material the next fall.

After my solo flight we flew back to the Syracuse airport where my dad
was waiting. My flight instructor,
following solo
tradition, cut out back of shirt to decorate and and hang on
wall. Such decorations usually include pilot name, date, aircraft tail
number, instructor signature. On mine I was also given the nickname
"screaming eagle", which my instructor gave me for my approaches that
were always a little too fast. I blame too many hours in Microsoft
Flight Simulator for this bad behavior.

At the end of the summer I joined Stephen at a job working in DECC,
which was the school district's "communications center" located at the
high school. Mostly it acted as the district copy shop. During the
summer we handled a lot of orders for teacher handouts for the
upcoming year. We also did a lot of laminating and trimming of random
letters and shapes to decorate elementary school class
rooms. Occasionally we did some binding as well, both
using comb
binding and thermal binding. We also made custom notepads, such as
PAC used at MUN conferences for notes, using glue applied to a brush
to pages held in a vice.

However, the most fun was operating the big Xerox machine. Although we
had a small copier for self-service use, the main machines was like
something behind the counter at Kinkos that no consumer ever gets to
touch themselves. The machine was shaped like a T that had a very
long top and a very short leg. At the intersection was computer
terminal to control the machine. The short leg was where the glass and
feeder were for originals, as well as a tray for the output of proof
copies. The middle of the right hand side of the top of the T was
where the toner was poured in. The far end of the right hand side
where the paper was loaded many reams at a time. The left end of the
top of the T was a very tall cabinet that was the collating and
stapling unit. The motor to lift the many bins full of paper in this
unit was strong enough to break your arm, we treated it with great
reverence. Out of the middle of the left side of T was a little
conveyor belt, out of which would come the large batch jobs for
pickup. Once the year got started, most of our work was on this big
monster, where we would work before school, during free periods, and
after school.

My work at DECC intersected with my musical theater related work in
the auditorium. For example, when I would get paid for setting up
microphones for school meetings, the equipment would come from
DECC. Before I worked there, they would have to have someone deliver
the equipment to the auditorium, now I could took care of that as
well. DECC also got us working video taping sports events for
coaches. At first I did some work taping a couple junior varsity home
football games, one of which was pretty miserable in the
rain. However, after that both Stephen and I taped most of the away
meets for the women's gymnastics team. Yes, we got paid by the hour to
hang out with the women's gymnastics team. Good work if you can get
it. It also include such perks as rides home from the boss in his
corvette, although it wasn't that exciting since I only lived a half
of a mile from the school. Sometimes people teased us about our
similarity between DECC employees and AV club members. The big
difference was that we got paid to be professional geeks. We were not
mere amateurs.

Before DECC, Stephen S had worked at the
Carvel ice cream shop near the corner of Jamesville Road and East
Genesse Street in DeWitt, in the same strip mall as hobby shop I used
to go to. I used to occasional sneak some free soft service ice cream
from him. My friends seemed to love working at frozen desert
stores. Lisa W worked across the store at the new TCBY store. I don't
think she ever got away with giving us free frozen yogurt entirely,
but I think she did slip us free extra toppings. Later Dave Y got a
job at the Haagen-Dazs ice cream shop at
the Carousel
Center mall when it opened senior year. He encouraged us to come
for free ice cream but it seemed pretty far to spend 20 minutes
driving there when Shoppingtown Mall was only 5 minutes away.

First period was Mr. Donadoni for AP Calculus. One of the more
memorable things Mr. Donadoni had us do was memorize a definition of
the integral of a function. Our AP Calculus class only covered "AB"
level material by the date of the AP exams in May, finishing the
remaining "BC" material between then and the end of the New York
school year in June. In order to take the BC material with
Mr. Donadoni, it was necessary to do an extra unit at the end of the
calendar year on your own time to get ahead of the rest of the class,
then work independently a unit ahead until the AP exam. After the AP
exam, you would have nothing to do until June. I loved this plan
because it not only meant I could be self paced, but also gave me made
the end of senior year even more relaxing. Rebecca and I both did
this, although we were in different class periods, so we really did
work independently. Both of us ended up acing the exam without any
issues. I did have a few friends in my own class period, namely Peter
E and Dave Y.

Second period was for senior science electives. The first quarter I
had Mrs. Quinn for anatomy and physiology where we dissected a fetal
pig and a grown cat. The second quarter I had bacteriology with
Mr. Lawton, the non-honors biology teacher who lived around the corner
from me on Woodside Road. I remember growing cultures on agar media
but not too much else. Third quarter I had Mr. Lawton again for
genetics. We did a number of experiments with fruit flies. I ended up
dropping the class because my second semester senioritis was so bad
that I couldn't complete my experiments regularly enough. The final
quarter I had Mrs. Quinn again for a class on sense organs where I
remember dissecting a cow eye.

Third period was gym and study hall. I ran into similar attendance
problems in gym as I had in genetics due to my senioritis. I actually
had to go in and do some make up gym classes after school to make sure
I met the state requirements for graduation. At the beginning of the
year I would work at DECC during study hall. Since I did this
regularly, I managed to get the teacher to let me go directly to DECC
without going to their class first.

Fourth period was physics with Mr. Wilson. The class was focused on
the New York State Regents curriculum, but I ended up taking the AP
exam without trouble. I got into a senioritis issue with Mr. Wilson
due to some unacceptable lab reports. He had originally warned us that
if our lab reports were in late we would receive a 50% for the
quarter. I did turn them in on time but he considered some to be
unacceptable and said I would receive a 50%. Eventually I think he
just took off some large penalty, such as 10% of my quarter
grade. Immediately after this fiasco he had an incredibly hard midterm
exam that he graded on a curve. It look silly when I basically blew
out the curve on the midterm exam, which made up a lot for the penalty
from the second quarter. I shared my desk with Rebecca D in the front
right corner of the room, with Scott S and Kim K behind us. A whole
lot of people were in my class such as Seth C, Alan G, Scott G, David
G, Stephen S, Jim P.

First semester I had health class 05-06 followed by 7th period
lunch. Almost all students took health sophomore year, but it would
have interfered with taking the AP Computer Science curriculum so I put
it off. I wasn't the only senior in this boat, Brian H was also in the
class with me. I sat in front of Jen L who I knew from the music
department and Kelly M who was a friend of Scott's sister Carrie who
was a sophomore that year. We all dutifully protected our baby egg
children.

The second half of the year I had study hall during 05-06. I used the
same trick of working at DECC to avoid going to checking with the
teacher. In practice what I would often do would be to spend study
hall periods 2-3 and 5-8 down on the stage in the theater hanging out
with friends. The main activity was
playing Hearts with
Stephen S, Dave Y, and Erica H. We played a game to 1000 which was
always very close. We had a spectacular ended where Dave won by
shooting the moon, which was particularly difficult with our rules
where you needed to get all the hearts and the queen of spades, but
not the jack of diamonds. Other people player other card games, such
as Jennifer T who used to
play Canasta.
Having lunch free for both fifth and seventh period meant that I could
see just about everybody for lunch instead of just half my
friends. Since most of us had taken to eating down in auditorium it
made it a lot of fun, like our own private club house. On nice days we
would often go outside to play Frisbee in the field north east of the
auditorium, which is sadly now filled with more parking lots.

Eighth period was Mr. Feldman for the required participation in
government class. Rebecca and I were both in the class and soon
noticed the tests were always from the questions in the back of the
book. Not exactly as challenging as AP US History which my friends
like Stephen S took. The second half of the year would have been
economics with Mr. Kilbride, but since I took it at Lemoyne College
the previous summer, I had yet another study hall period.

Originally I had signed up for AP Spanish Literature with Miss Kuon
but dropped leaving behind Scott S and Rachael S. I switched to taking
ninth period drivers education with Mr. Andrews for the first half of
the year. Sasie T and Lydia L were in my class, with Lydia one of the
people assigned to my car. The second half of the year I had
Mr. DeOrio for computer aided design (CAD). CAD was a new course, he
only had a few PCs, maybe 5 of 6. We didn't have something fancy like
AutoCAD to use, just something basic, but it let us do some basic
mechanical drawing on the computer.

For tenth period I had Mr. Becker
for SUPA English. The put the
English class at the end of the day so we couldn't leave campus early,
which I certainly would have tried to arrange given all my study hall
time the second half of the year. Mr. Becker had been my indoor track
coach sophomore year. SUPA was short for Syracuse University Project
Advance, allowing us to earn college credit for our high school
English class. Most of my honors friends took AP English Literature
instead, but since I didn't like English, I figured taking the class
were I might be more likely to skip out on the college version to be a
better trade off. Sasie T was in the class with me, we became pretty
good friends from our time together with Mr. Becker.

Activities Senior Year

As a National Honor Society member I tutored other students during
senior year. I forget how many hours we had to do total, but there
definitely was a quota we were expected to meet. I mostly did tutoring
in math but also did a little bit for the computer programming
classes. There wasn't really a very good way for people to request
tutoring, so often I reached out to people I knew and offered my help
on my own. It wasn't a very good system, as done this way people often
helped their friends and not the people who needed the most help.

Life Senior Year

In September of my senior year I broke up with Sarah. It was September
as we approached our one year anniversary. In fact, our upcoming
anniversary was what caused me to reflect on our relationship and
decide to end it. Unlike the previous year where I had really been
excited to pick out jewelry for her birthday and to get her a cheesy
boy band album for Hanukkah and even stay out all night to get concert
tickets for Valentine's Day, I was dreading getting an anniversary
gift. When I realized that I was going to be getting a gift because I
had to do it and not because I wanted to do it, I knew something was
wrong.

What had gone wrong? Nothing really had happened negatively between
us. There was no argument or fight. In fact, we briefly rejoined for a
week or so, before finally ending of our romantic relationship. I
think for me the issue was that I didn't see our romantic relationship
as having a long term future. I always looked at high school dating as
practice, as a precursor to more serious adult relationships. The end
goal was not marriage, but to have some fun while learning about the
opposite sex. However, after a year, Sarah and I were in a pretty much
steady state in our relationship. We still had fun hanging out, but it
was more almost more as friends than anything else. I guess people
would say the "honeymoon" phase was over. There weren't a lot of new
experiences or discoveries to be made about each other.

One thing that turned out well is that Sarah was very insistent that
we remain friends. I admit it was awkward at first but it did work out
in the end, despite stupid behavior on my part during the semester
finals, which I'll admit to below. Sarah went on to attend Harvard so
we did continue to have a friendship throughout college. Since Sarah
remained in the Boston area, I've been able to see her and her family
through the years when I've been back in town to visit my own family.

Being single, I was back go my old ways of getting in trouble with
Scott. Before we were banned from holding political office in PAC, we
wanted to take over as editors of the mostly weekly PAC News. So
instead, I remember that Scott put together a few issues of his own
satirical PAC Newz which I dutifully reproduced for him. In another
incident, I broke his kitchen table. We hadn't been doing anything
exciting, I might just have sat on it and it just wasn't that
strong. It was a round table with a central post with four feet
extending from the center, one of them just came off. We tried to
covered it up by putting the leg back under but eventually his parents
discovered the damage as we got yelled at.

I continued to work on my private pilot certificate during the fall,
continuing the momentum from the previous summer. I was signed off to
solo in my preferred rental plane,
the "Traumahawk",
on September 13th after which on the 21st of September I made my first
complete solo flight from Syracuse to Oswego and back without any
instructor at all. It is kind of amazing that as a 17 year old I could
just show up and rent a plane and fly it without any supervision,
especially since at the time I didn't even have a license to drive. On
the 24th of October I was signed off for my first short cross control
solo, which I actually flew on the 27th, flying from Syracuse to
Binghamton to Oswego and back to Syracuse. Now that I was flying solo
I spent more time talking to Lindy, the woman who worked behind the
desk at SAIR, since she would not only handle my rental and payments
as before, but also now sign my log book to show the completion of my
solo flights. On the 30th I did my first night flying up to the Oswego
airport with Dave Conklin. We were in the pattern with this attractive
woman pilot that we knew from SAIR and we chatted with her a bit over
the radio while we were in the pattern together. On the 3rd of
November I did my second short cross country flight. This was very
different than my previous flight because it actually involved flying
into a strange airport, Utica, that I had never been to before. In
fact, I had troubling locating the airport in the late afternoon haze
and had to have the control their flash the lights twice before I
found a bearing to enter the pattern for landing.

Later in the fall I started going out with my friend Rebecca D. This
relationship started out very differently because Rebecca and I had
been friends since the end of freshmen year. We had become close
friends sophomore year and would often discuss our crushes,
relationship successes and failures, break ups, etc. We were close
enough that I had even told Rebecca about my own feelings for her. We
had even become even closer friends after going to summer camp
together, where we were each key in helping the other find their
significant others. We both recently had gotten out of relationships,
myself with Sarah and Rebecca with my friend Adam G, and of course we
both knew all the details of these recent events. So when we started
going out, we already knew almost everything about each other, which
was a very different experience, at least for me.

Rebecca and I had both seen the
movie When
Harry Met Sally..., which among other things is famous for the
theme that men and women can't be friends. We had often joked that we
were the counter example to this rule, but of course secretly I knew
that I had wanted to go out with her while we were friends, which
actually is the exact reason why Harry first tells Sally that men and
women cannot be friends near the beginning of the movie:

Harry: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally: Why not?
Harry: What I'm saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally: That's not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry: No you don't.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: No you don't.
Sally: Yes I do.
Harry: You only think you do.
Sally: You say I'm having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry: No, what I'm saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: They do not.
Harry: Do too.
Sally: How do you know?
Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally: So, you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry: No. You pretty much want to nail 'em too.
Sally: What if THEY don't want to have sex with YOU?
Harry: Doesn't matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally: Well, I guess we're not going to be friends then.
Harry: I guess not.
Sally: That's too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.

So now that we were dating, the whole movie took on a new
perspective. Here we were dating a friend, which of course is the
final conclusion to the movie as well.

On October 13, 1990, the East Syracuse-Minoa high school hosted a
small model United Nations, ESMMUN, about the scale of our UNYMUN.
Rebecca and I were assigned together to represent USSR on the Social,
Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee. We actually won best delegate,
the first real individual award I won at an MUN. She really showed me
how MUN really was supposed to work. Somehow with her I was much more
willing to take things seriously. In November, we went on to win an
honorable delegation award at the Hilton MUN.

With the fall of senior year came college application season. As part
of this came class rank, which was given to all seniors one day during
our 10th period English classes. While they were being handed out, I
learned that the rank was out of 161 people. I hope to myself to be 16
or higher so that I could check the top 10% box that was on some of
the applications. When I found I was in fact 16th, I was quite
ecstatic. Peter E ended up being number one with an overall grade point
average of 97.0%. Initially Allison H was number two and Rebecca was
number three, but Rebecca found a mistake on hers and was able to get
hers changed to be number two as well. I don't quite remember the rest
of the top ten although it included people such as Dave Y, Scott S,
Lydia C. I would guess that other top students like Samantha M would
be up there too. Lydia L was right after me at number 17. Now that we
had out class rank, and with it the transcripts for our applications,
it was time to narrow our choices of schools and start sending in
applications.

Over the years I had visited a number of potential schools including
MIT, the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, and Johns
Hopkins. Ever since my bad experience with the computer science theory
class during the summer of 1989 I had shifted my focus from computer
science to aerospace engineering. My first choices were MIT and
Caltech, although my guidance counselor Mrs. Doughty didn't think I
had much hope to get into them. My main hope was on the University of
Michigan, with other alternatives being Ohio State University, Purdue,
Georgia Tech, and finally SUNY Buffalo. My father wanted me to apply
to Harvard, but I didn't want to do another essay.

I need to get three letters of recommendation for most of the
applications. It was recommended to get them from teachers across a
variety of disciplines, particularly in English which would not be the
strongest part of my transcript. I asked my sophomore year English
teacher Mrs. Spillane for a recommendation since she was the one
English teacher in high school that I seemed to like my work. I
nervously asked Mr. Monterosso for a recommendation, a little unsure
after the junior year NAIMUN fiasco, but knowing that he wrote great
recommendation letters. I don't remember who I asked for my final
letter. It might have been Dr. Daley who I had known not only from
Earth Science but also from Science Olympiad. On the other hand, I can
imagine I might have asked Mr. Jerauld, who actually had given me a
number of J-D awards. It might seem a little strange that I didn't ask
any of the regular math teachers for letters, but I guess I figured my
math team awards, SAT scores and achievement test scores spoke enough
of my mathematical ability. Most of the math teachers found me a
little annoying as well since I often made it clear how unnecessary
they were for me to learn the material by working on the homework
before the lecture part of class was even over.

The applications themselves weren't too difficult. I had already
organized a lot of the extracurricular information for my NHS
application the previous year. I extended that with some of my
computer BBS activities, such as my Fidonet Ursa Minor Beta BBS,
discussed on my machines page, as well
as my co-sysop roles at The Mexican Connection Fidonet BBS, The Bassett
Fidonet BBS, and Valhalla BBS. I was fortunate to be able to fill out two
optional sections on the MIT application. First, I could list that my
father was an alumni. Second, I could list mom's cousin Don Duffy as
an employee of the Research Lab for Electronics. The essays were most
of the work. MIT let you make your own question and answer it so I
wrote about my solo flight experience, which I hoped would be
entertaining to reviewers than the average essay they would be
reading. I wrote some more traditional and forgettable essays for
other schools.

Although most deadlines were in December, I applied in November to MIT
Early Action as well as to the University of Michigan, which has a
rolling admissions. Rebecca also applied to MIT Early Action and we
both went on consecutive weekends for in person interviews with a MIT
alumni in neighboring Fayetteville. Fortunately, Rebecca went first so
I wasn't too worried about what it would be like. However, I probably
looked a little silly in retrospect starting the interview by
mentioning that I was friends with the girl that had come the week
before.

To my surprise, I was accepted to MIT Early Action in December. Not
surprising, Rebecca was also accepted. Having been accepted I didn't
send in some of my applications such as to OSU, Purdue, Georgia Tech
so that we could avoid the application fees. I also got into the
University of Michigan and eventually Caltech and SUNY Buffalo, not
receiving any rejection letters. Having been accepted to MIT made life
relative to my peers very relaxing. While they were still stressing
about finishing applications and agonizing over when they might hear a
decision, I had been accepted to one of my top schools. For better or
worse, it gave me a serious case of senioritis.

I'm not sure if my senioritis was to blame, but for some reason
Mr. Romano tried to give me detention for something I did in health
class. I had never had a detention in my life and was a little
troubled by it. However, it turned out I was supposed to setup the
auditorium for that nights school board meeting, so instead of going
to detention, I was paid to work for the school. I never ended up
serving that detention or any other in my life.

Even though I evaded my health class detention, it didn't keep me out
of a bigger self-inflicted fiasco. As a preparation for the final
exam, Mr. Romano gave us an assignment to look up definitions for
several dozen terms. As part of the new post-dating friendship, Sarah
had lent me her notes from when she had taken the class the previous
year. Sure enough, it included her copy of all the definitions for the
same study guide. Some of my classmates noticed I had this, and asked
for copies. It hit on me that I should sell the copies for a few
dollars each. I ended up selling quite a few copies and making a bit
of spending money. Unfortunately, Sarah found out and was not too
pleased. Not only had I not asked her, but I had profited selling her
work. I don't think she would take the money I offered, which would
have made me feel better. It put a strain on our then tenuous
relationship, but Sarah forgave me and I didn't do any such boneheaded
things in the future.

Soon after the holiday break, Rebecca and I broke up. Things had got
pretty serious between us. Rebecca was talking about how great it was
going to be next year when we were at MIT together. This was
disconcerting for two reasons. First, I wasn't sure if I would rather
go to Caltech over MIT for aerospace engineering. Caltech operates
NASA's
famed Jet
Propulsion Lab (JPL) and going there seemed like it might be a
great way to get involved in a JPL project. Second, I always
considered high school relationships to be practice. Indeed this had
factored into my not that distant breakup with Sarah. Now I was
looking at the very realistic possibility of going to the same college
as my high school girlfriend.

In the end, my concerns about the seriousness of our relationship did
not precipitate the breakup. However, over the holiday break another
close friend of mine was going through some issues of their own. When
I found out about this after we were back in school, it shook me up
significantly. Understandably, this person had only shared their
issues with a few close friends, but Rebecca was not one of
them. However, Rebecca picked up on the fact that something was
bothering me. Unfortunately, it really bothered her that I wouldn't
share what was going on. I know she was only pushing out of concern
for her concern for me, but I just wanted to be left alone.

Eventually I was just too overwhelmed by everything going on and broke
up with Rebecca. She didn't really accept this and kept looking for an
explanation. Finally I just couldn't take it any more. We were both at
Donna C's birthday party at her house, probably on the evening of
January 12th. She came up to me outside and I yelled at her and pushed
her away, knocking her into Kim K who happened to be with her. After
that incident I just stopped talking to her cold turkey. Unfortunately,
this made sharing a desk with her in physics awkward.

I am not particularly proud of how I handled my break up with
Rebecca. I wish I could have figured out some way of coping better
than just closing down and shutting her out. She had been one of my
best and closest friends during most of high school and now I didn't
talk to her at all. Unfortunately, other people also treated her badly
after our breakup as well. For example, she might not get invited to
social events that I was going to because people didn't want the
awkwardness of having us both there. Some people weren't necessarily
friends with Rebecca themselves, and had only invited her to things
because she was my friend. A couple people that actively disliked
Rebecca took seemed to take perverse joy in her troubles. In any case,
her social circle became surprising small after our breakup. She ended
up becoming good friends with Shelley B, someone she had never been
particularly close with before. Rebecca and Shelley becoming close
friends senior year provided a strange bookend to my own close but
later fizzled relationship with Shelley freshmen year.

I skipped NAIMUN my senior year probably mostly because the events of
the junior year trip. However, Scott, my partner in crime in those
events, didn't let this stop him. In fact he had an awesome time,
coming back having met a new girl Colleen from ES-M. He broke up with
Kim and started dating Colleen. The one upside of this was that Kim
started sitting in my seat next to Rebecca in physics, allowing me to
sit behind the two of them with Scott, ending the month of awkwardly
sitting with Rebecca even though we weren't speaking.

Another friend of mine, who will remain nameless, also started dating
an ES-M girl named Monica. One on magical evening at an ES-M party,
the two of them went off in to a bedroom for some private
time. Meanwhile, out in the main room of the party, what would come on
the radio but "Will you still love me tomorrow?", which we
blared on their behalf. When the couple returned to join the rest of
us, Monica's Harvard T-Shirt was on inside out. Oops!

During our February break we caught a Space-A flight from Philadelphia
to Aviano Air
Base in Italy. What made this flight unique was that it was a
a
government contract flight operated by a commercial airline, so
instead of being in the back of a military cargo plane, we had
stewardess and everything. On a previous trip to Aviano we had just
done a quick jaunt over to see Venice, however this time we set out
for Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii.

On the road to Florence, we
stopped in Bologna where we saw their very
ownleaning
towers. We climbed the taller, but less crooked, Asinelli tower,
which is ringed inside with a sometimes scary wooden staircase.

In Rome, we didn't do
all the usual tourist attractions. Although we drove by such sights as
the Colosseum and
the
Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, we didn't stop to see them,
which always bugged me about the Colosseum, but at least one of my
parents who had visited previously assured me I wasn't missing much.
We did walk around and
see Trevi
Fountain
the Spanish
Steps, and
the Pantheon. The
Pantheon was definitely my favorite sight in all of Rome, probably
because it was so overwhelming and yet I had never seen much about it
before my trip. We also headed over to see Saint
Peter's Square
and
the Basilica,
although we didn't go on the tour to see such sights as the
Sistine
Chapel.

Naples was
sort of a disappointment, a relatively modern city, not quite the
overwhelming tourist destination after Florence and Rome. My main
memories are having our rental car hit by someone on a scooter,
picking up a Hard Rock Naples shirt, and seeing an amazingly beautiful
redhead woman while waiting for my parents at some business.

The skyline of Naples is dominated by
Mount Vesuvius. We
drove up the mountain in the evening where there was a nice view of
the city back across the
Gulf of
Naples. We were running a little low on gas and with few options
for fuel on the side of the volcano we coasted down much of the
way. The next day we visited the ruins of the city
of Pompeii. This
scope of the ruins was a little breathtaking. I had been amazed with
the quantity and quality of what I had seen in Rome, but Pompeii is
basically an entirely contiguous town that has been preserved. I know
that is what we were all told in history class growing up, but walking
though the place really makes it sink in. Some of the more memorable
parts were the tile mosaics and frescoes, some of the larger structures
such as the theater, and finally the plaster casts of the victims.

We returned to Philadelphia from Italy on the 27th of February
1991. After college Rachael stole my Hard Rock Naples shirt and my
parents gave me some framed prints of Italy.

In March I started looking for a new my flight instructor. My old
instructor had stopped teaching. He worked for Mohawk Airlines and I'm
not sure if he had picked up new hours or just relocated. On the 5th
of March, I went on a one time flight with a new instructor but that
ended up being the only flight I ever did the the person, I don't even
remember his name which is too hard to make out in my log book,
although I have a vague recollection of what he looked like.

The senior year musical was Roger's and
Hammerstien's Carouselwith
shows on the evenings of March 15th and 16th and a matinee on March
17th. This year I was the lighting director. During rehearsal's there
was a lot of tedious time in the lighting booth waiting for the
director and actors work through things. We came up with the idea to
run a phone line to the booth. We did this by splicing into an
extension in an occasionally used floater office that was left
unlocked at the bottom of the stairs to the lighting booth. Helping me
with this project was a new freshmen on the lighting crew John H,
little brother of Megan H, who we affectionately referred to as
"Permafrosh". As an example of why we expected John to be a perpetual
newbie freshmen, while I was still wiring the jack on the newly wired
phone extension, John thought it would be a good idea to go to
Mrs. Nye's office and dial the extension to test it out, giving me a
nasty shock. In the end the phone line was not just used for voice
calls, but I also brought in my laptop and used its modem to dial into
BBSs while running the board, which was less noticeable than talking to
people in the auditorium. On a slightly related note, John was able to
imitate the screeching sounds of these old school modems, negotiating
a carrier detect a the lower speeds such as 110 or 300 baud. After the
show as over I had a number of unreimbursed expenses related to the
show. Mrs. Nye offered me a Carousel sweatshirt in exchange which I
took. My mom was not very happy not to be reimbursed cash.

Science Olympiad in late March, probably Saturday March 23rd. My main
focus was on building a contraption to move a egg a certain number of
meters without breaking it, using the energy of a brick falling one
meter, translating potential energy into kinetic energy. Faramarz S
was my partner but most of the hours working on the project were with
my dad in our basement. The device was a hybrid of my Expert Builder
LEGO and my father's old Erector sets, combine with whatever else we
could find. We apparently took the brick thing too literally, other
people used weights.

My contraption didn't earn me any honors that year, but I did get an
award for physics and for rock and fossil identification. The second
place in rock and fossil identification was pretty amazing considering
most of my effort was a cram session going samples with Dr. Daley one
afternoon in his classroom, although I'm sure I probably went over my
old earth science regents review book as well. First place went to a
guy from Marcelles whose name I actually recognized. It turned out
this girl I liked from Marcelles, another friend of Donna's that I had
met, had actually complained to me about this guy that liked her and
was always bugging her. As chance would have it, I was going to the
Bad Company and Damn Yankees concert with her the next Monday, March
25th, which I was sure to let him know. I was happy for him that he
got first place to make up for the fact that I got the girl. In
reality, I didn't really get the girl, but we did have fun at the
concert at the War Memorial. I drove out to Marcelles to pick her up
and take her home, kind of surprising to me now that my parents let me
do that on a school night.

April was the time for prefrosh visits. The first was to MIT where I
traveled by plane alone to Boston. I arrived to campus via the Kendall
Square T stop where I found a campus map across the street. I located
Baker House and plotted a course that took me across Killian Court. I
was staying in Baker with Adam L, my friend from J-D, who lived in one
of the '11 rooms. They had at one point squeezed in five people to his
room, and although I think it was only four when I was there, I still
slept on the couch. MIT didn't technically have a prefrosh weekend
for all students back then, I was really just crashing the Campus
Preview/Minority Spring Weekend for women and underrepresented
minorities.

The weekend activities actually started on Friday, with me flying in
on Thursday night. During the day on Friday I looked around campus
including visiting some lectures and classes. I ran into Rebecca
outside the small classrooms on the third floor of building 34 where
we just ignored each other. I also killed some time playing Risk on
Adam's Mac in his room. On Saturday, I mostly hung out in Baker with
Adam and some of his friends. I did go to the big Baker party Saturday
night which was the annual MBPP party, where MBPP stood alternatively
for Massive Baker Party Plus or for Massive Band Party Plus.

My second prefrosh trip was to Caltech during the weekend of the 19th
to 21st of April. This time my dad came with me. While he was waiting
around for me for this first event to start, another prefrosh came up
to talk to him. It was Jason H, my friend from Mount Harmony
Elementary School. He had recognized my father and come up to talk to
him. He also had gotten into MIT and Caltech. At the time I hadn't
made up my mind, but Jason was already leaning towards Caltech. Among
other things he was turned off my MIT's acceptance letter than came
with a pretentious suitable for framing acceptance certificate. Mostly
he learned toward Caltech because he was more interested in science
than engineering.

My own mind was made up largely made up by the small student body and
very small number of female students. The undergraduate class size was
around 200, only slightly more than my high school class which was
161, which compared to MIT's roughly 1000 seemed tiny. Everyone on
campus knew who the prefrosh were because they didn't recognize
them. I wanted a student body big enough that there would always be
new people to meet and new experiences to have, not some place where
everyone would know everyone. The male/female ratio was also a major
issues. Not only was I following Christian T's advice to prioritize my
social life over my academics, but college was were I expected to look
for a serious life long relationship. Having so few females didn't
seem to help the odds of finding that special someone. Indeed, talking
to the other prefrosh, none of the women seemed to be going to
Caltech. Apparently Caltech had a policy of paying the travel expenses
for prefrosh women, so they were all there for the free trip to So
Cal. The one nice Caltech woman, a redhead, that I met was transferring
to Harvard the next year.

My opinion of Caltech wasn't helped by the fact that my I barely
interacted with my official host, basically just crashing in a scary
dark room, which I believe was in Rickets. One positive highlight of a
dinner I had in Fleming was learning that the commencement speaker
that year was going to be then President George H. W. Bush. I also
enjoyed hanging out playing cards with some people in Page, learning a
little about bridge, playing Mao, as well as learning a card game
called Bulimia. Bulimia, similar to the eating disorder, had two
rounds. In the first round you binged to try to get as many cards as
possible. In the second round you purged to try to get rid of all of
your cards. All this fun card playing aside, my Caltech prefrosh
weekend probably ended up making up my mind to go to MIT instead. It
wasn't just the social factors, certainly MIT was more diverse in
terms of available majors and frankly Caltech didn't have as good of
an aerospace program for undergraduates. The academic factors had me
leaning to MIT before hand, but the social factors pushed me over.

During the trip to Caltech my father and I also went to visit my
friend Dave C who had moved from DeWitt to Tustin, CA. After meeting
with Dave's parents at his house and Tustin, my dad took Dave and I
down to Newport Beach. Dave and I hung out there for a few hours where
I picked a souvenir Newport Beach T-shirt to take home.

I was happy to learn that Rebecca got into Harvard and decided to go
there instead of MIT, avoiding 4 years of awkward moments. In the end
with both of us going to school in Boston I couldn't help but run into
her freshmen year, but that turned out to be a good thing. However, I
wouldn't be the only one from J-D to go to MIT. Lydia C and Lydia L
both accepted offers from MIT, ending up as roommates in Next House.

This year I managed a third place finish in the OCMTA math contest.

I took my driver's license test on April 15th in our Dodge Dynasty. I
almost blew it when I asked at the first intersection which way to
turn. The examiner asked me which way I thought I should turn, after
which I realized it was a one way street. After recovering my composure
after this stupid question, I managed to pass the exam, unlike Stephen
S who had to take the exam four times before passing.

After getting my license I had a lot more freedom to get in
trouble. When I went out driving I usually took the Dodge Dynasty,
since my dad usually used
our Ford Bronco
to commute
to KamanSciences in
Utica, NY.

One early misadventure was getting pulled by the DeWitt police in
Scott's driveway. I say pulled over I had stopped in his driveway
before I ever noticed the the police car's flashing lights behind
me. I played dumb about the no U-turn sign even though I had turned
there instead of the next intersection specifically to beat Scott to
his house. Feigned ignorance was bliss and I only received a warning.

Scott managed to accumulate an entourage of freshmen women his senior
year. At various points this included women such as Beth L, Sue J,
Angela F, Patti B, Amanda M, Andrea M, Lisa S. I ended up being
friends with several of the entourage. One time I drove Lisa S and one
of her friends, probably Andrea M, down to a party at Rob B house down
on the east side of the Jamesville Reservoir. Rob B was a new student
that year in that junior class that I knew from math team amongst
other places. During this trip I demonstrated my "stealth car"
technique, getting going a good speed down the rural road using the
V6, putting the car in neutral, and then turning off both the lights
and the ignition, coasting silently downhill in the night.

During the spring I started pursuing Bridget L. I say pursue because
unlike previous crushes this one did not lead to a simple black and
white rejection. Bridget said that her strict parents, mostly her
father, did not allow her to date in high school. I learned from Sarah
that was "afraid to go out with me" for fear of liking me back and
then having to defy her parents. I did manage to talk her into coming
over to my house to watch a movie, the forgettable
Arachnophobia, but nothing came of it. I did have dinner over at
her house one evening, not far from Dave Y's house, and I have to say
her father was pretty intimidating to the prospective suitor.

I asked Bridget L to senior ball and she said yes. She had gone to the
senior ball with Chris M the year before so I knew there was precedent
that her parents would let her go. However between asking Bridget and
and going to the dance, it had become increasingly obvious that Lisa S
of the entourage was interested in me. We frequently walked home from
school together, often just hanging out talking on the corner of
Brockway Lane and Woodside Road where our paths diverged. Although it
was clear we probably were becoming more than friends, I thought it
would be awkward to officially start dating her before going to the
ball with Bridget.

It turned out that was a good idea. Scott in the meanwhile started
dating a freshmen from his entourage, Beth L, who happened to be
Bridget L's younger sister. Beth was a little more rebellious than her
older sister, not letting her parents stand in the way of her having a
boyfriend. Unfortunately for Beth she would not be coming with us to
the senior ball. Scott was already committed to going to the senior
ball with our friend Donna. It caused quite a lot of drama when we
showed up in the limo to pick up Bridget, since Beth was upstairs
annoyed that her boyfriend was taking another girl to the dance.

Bridget wore a cream with peach dress with matching pearls to the
ball, while I wore matching peach cummerbund and tie. In the end it
was nice to go with Bridget as just friends. She didn't get jealous
when I danced with my other friends such as Donna and Lisa W. If I had
gone with Lisa S, I probably would have had more romantic ambitions in
mind rather than just having a good time with all my friends at this
last dance of our high school years.

So Bridget and I didn't end up dating. We had become close friends and
corresponded through my college years, at first via snail mail when
she was in high school and then via email when she was at
Williams. During her time at Williams, even after I graduated from
MIT, I got to hear about her courtship with her soulmate Corey. I
later met Corey at Sarah N's wedding and he really was quite an
amazing guy as she had described him.

Our school had an unofficial tradition of senior wills. Each person
could write a will and "leave" things to friends, both graduating and
underclassmen. Frequently people would reminisce about various things
that had done throughout high school to remind their friends of all
the good times they had had. Stephen S and I ended up running the
senior wills although we were a little overwhelmed with the financing,
production, and distribution. We did get them out though, although
sadly I lost my copy and Stephen admits to getting rid of his during
one of his moves. Fortunately Scott S found his and handed to off to
Amy K to bring to me in California. I scanned it and
posted images
and a large PDF for everyone to reminisce.

The end of the year J-D Awards were on 6 June 1991. In my final year I
received a Computer Aided Drawing award from Mr. DeOrio. I also again
received the Service award, although this time I imagine it was for my
various auditorium work.

Our high school graduation was held downtown at Onondaga County Civic
Center. We had actually held a rehearsal there before the main
event. Peter E was our valedictorian and gave a speech. I believe the
class president may have done the same. Scott had a graduation party
which went to, although it was a bit overwhelmed with his family
including aunts and uncles and cousins from the area. My parents gave
me a nice gold and silver finished watch as a graduation present, so I
finally replaced my old Swatch. I still have this watch although the
band gave out sometime after college and needs to be repaired or
replaced.

Summer 1991

Lisa S and I started dating the summer after my senior year. We would
often go on walks around the neighborhood, mostly up by the high
school, including up to the old quarry in the woods behind the school
that Mr. Daley had taken our class to freshmen year. We started
holding hands on these walks but I was dragging out the first kiss
even more than usual. Finally one day it happened. We were sitting on
one of the grassy fields down the hills north of the high school. I
think Lisa resolved to sit there until I got it over with.

Lisa's weekend evening activities were curtailed by her babysitting
duties for the Boheim family, the same family I had been paper boy for
back when I lived on Michaels Drive. Apparently around the same time I
had moved to Woodside Road, the Boheims had moved to Holliston Circle,
a couple of doors down from Lisa. Apparently it was a pretty rocky
time for the Boheims, as described in this
Sports
Illustrated article.

I often went over to Lisa's house since it was so close to mine. Her
mother was very friendly and welcoming. Her father was very nice as
well but I felt a little more intimidated by him, as I hope I am to my
daughter's boyfriends someday. He had gone to MIT and I was going
there so when we talked we usually talked about that or something
tangentially related, such as his Bose speakers, which of course come
from an MIT spinoff company. He was a VP at GE and although I found
that impressive, I also didn't know what someone like that did and
never asked him about it. I think I met her older brother on one
occasion although he didn't live at home anymore, they certainly did
talk about him.

Lisa and I broke up before I went to college. In fact, she was going
away to spend the end of the summer with family in South Dakota, so we
broke up before she left. I was sad about it, hoping to delay it at
least until just before I went away, but it did leave me a single man
for the end of my last summer at home.

Later when I was away at college, Lisa ended up dating Adam G. Looking
back, Adam and I shared two girlfriends and a paper route, fortunately
at different times. We went to summer camp, high school, and college
together. He even went with Sarah to her senior ball. Somehow we
managed to stay friends through all of this!

My main project for the summer was to get my private pilot
certificate. I had a new
instructor, Clem
Torino, that summer. Our first lesson together was on 24 June and
he had to get me signed off all of my solo endorsements from Dave
Conklin had expired.

I had a birthday party for my 18th birthday on July 20th, 1991. It was
started out outside at my house, with lunch served off the grill on
picnic tables to the left of the house. I think we had some activities
going on inside later in the afternoon, possible watching a movie or
just sitting around listening to music. This made me miss the
apparently big scene of Sarah N breaking up with her boyfriend Tyler B
who she had been dating the past year.

There were a number of other get togethers with the nostalgic seniors
that summer. Jennifer T had a pool party at her house off Jamesville
Road, near my old Michaels Drive house. There was a picnic at a park
somewhere with a large number of people. A lot of people were doing
some last chance yearbook signing and exchanging of senior
portraits. I exchanged portraits with Amy K who, as I mentioned above,
apologized in my yearbook for crushing my life, although she didn't
remember it. There were a number of parties down at Donna C's house on
Gordon Cooper Drive in Jamesville. Donna and Scott had become friends
with Yvonne W and Jessica S and we saw them a lot in the summer at
at the regular parties at Donna's and Adam G's.

I always seemed to tun into trouble
driving back from Donna's late at night on Apulia Road. One time a
small animal ran out in front of me and I slammed on the breaks, only
to have it get caught under my front tire as the ABS breaks pulsed me
to a stop. Another time on the same stretch I was driving Scott's
minivan home with him in the passenger seat and Stephen S in the
back. Scott started fooling around and opening the door and Stephen
used Scott's seat belt to restrain him to make sure him didn't fall
out.

Scott had a big party one night when his parents were out of town. I
don't think his sister was there either, so perhaps they were taking
her on a college tour or something. I don't think the party was meant
to get that large, but it certainly was pretty loud when his parents
called. I don't know how it happened that someone answered the
phone. I think that people had been answering because people had been
calling to find out about the party and to ask directions. Somehow
Scott was not around at the time, I forget if he was just in the
bathroom or had gone out to get some party supplies. In any case,
someone handed me the phone to deal with the situation. I think I
successfully managed to convince them that he was just in the bathroom
and that there were just a few of us over for the evening.

Darien Lake trip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_Lake
two cars worth of people (Sarah, ...)
really bad thunderstorms on the way back
hydroplaning
scary but we made it back!

In August I made my big push to finish my private pilot
certificate. On the 7th of August I made my third short cross country
solo flight from Syracuse to Cortland to Binghamton and back to
Syracuse. On the 12th of August I made my first long cross country
solo flight from Syracuse to Buffalo to Binghamton and back to
Syracuse. During the flight from Syracuse to Buffalo I remember flying
directly over Rochester airport. Buffalo was probably one of the
bigger airports I had flown into and had to taxi quite a distance to
get gassed up. The flight from Buffalo to Binghamton was quite scenic
and unlike the other legs did not parallel any major expressways so I
had to follow along closely on the map and make more frequent use of
radio navigation to make sure I wasn't getting lost.

On the 19th of August, my instructor, Clem Torino, signed me off to
take my private pilot flight test. The exam was scheduled for the
22nd. Clem was unhappy with who I drew as examiner, apparently he was
known to be tougher that the other options. Indeed, although my check
ride was uneventful, I was failed because examiner said I didn't rotate
for takeoff at the planes Vr rotation speed. I argued that
I had been flying the Traumahawk long enough to know it was better to
use a higher speed, but the examiner was not convinced.

My instructor gave me another .8 hours of instruction that night and
managed to reschedule another test for the next day. On the 23rd the
examiner did not make me redo all of the previous days work. He just
wanted to see me take off at the correct rotation speed. I attempted
to do it by the book, only to have the a true Traumahawk experience.
as soon as the plane came out of ground effect, it stalled, sliding to
the left. The tail actually came down and hit the runway. Note that
this plane is not a tail dragger and has a nose gear. In any case, I
pushed the nose down, and got the plane in the air. The examiner
passed me, acknowledging that perhaps I did know the limits of the
plane better than he did.

So my private pilot certificate was issued on 23 August 1991 with
single engine land rating. I had accumulated just under 75 hours of
flight time. The FAA minimum was 40 hours, although I made it in
within the average bounds of 60-80 hours, which is pretty good given
the some what on again, off again pattern of my training. I took my
first flight with passengers the next day with two landings at
Syracuse, taking my father and my sister each for a ride, for a total
of 1.4 hours of flight time. On the 28th I received a Medical
Certificate 2nd Class, as my old 3rd class certificate had been tied
to my student pilot certificate.

I went to the New York State Fair with Donna's friend from Marcelles,
the same one that I had gone to the Damn Yankees concert with. The
fair was on from August 22nd through September 2nd that year but I
forget exactly what day we went. She brought some friends of hers
along, include a cheerleader named Nadine. Donna's friend bailed
early, but I ended up spending the day with Nadine. Scott didn't
believe I spent the day hanging out with a cheerleader.

New York State Fair 1991

Just before going to MIT, I shared goodbye kiss with Sarah N on the
porch swing outside Adam G's house at the one last summer party. It
was an emotional separation for both of us but we parted as
friends. She game me some Gumby stationary to write her with. I may
have used it once or twice, but I usually preferred to call her on
phone on weekend afternoons. But I kept the paper including some
letters I never sent, including an amusing one where I talk about a
girl I met at MIT named Jennifer.

On Thursday, August 29, 1991 I flew to Boston for MIT for freshmen
rush and orientation (R/O).

Other high school era memories

Food

My family usually used to get pizza once a week, most on Friday
nights. When we lived on Michaels Drive we used to go to a local place
called Athens Pizza that featured square pizzas and was located on
Jamesville Road behind the strip mall with the hobby shop and Carvel.
When we moved to Woodside Road we used the recently introduced
Domino's delivery a few times, but switched to Little Caesars for the
Pizza! Pizza! when the opened, although It was a bit of a hike down to
the Little Caesars by Liquor Square.

I used to like to go to the Ponderosa Steakhouse next to the IHOP at
the corner of Erie Boulevard and East Genesee Street because for its
big salad bar more than the steaks. For steaks we starting going
to Mr. Steak in
Fayetteville, especially for celebrating birthdays since the special
person got a free meal. Occasionally we would head to Coleman's Irish
Pub in the historically Irish Syracuse neighborhood
of Tipperary
Hill, which is known for its upside down traffic light with the
green on top.

Our real favorite after moving to Woodside Road was the
Ground Round
at the end of Maple Drive where it hit Genesee Street. It was so
convenient and likable that we often went there weekly, especially
since Rachael liked the popcorn, kids meals, and the weekly Bingo the
Clown, who was played by among others Dave H and Scott S! Before his
starring role as Bingo, Scott had worked as a bus boy at the
restaurant until that did damage to one of the discs in his
back. Scott also had similar costume experience where he once played
Clifford the Big Red Dog at the Waldenbooks where he worked at Shoppingtown.

At some point in high school, friends started getting together just to
get out to eat. Sometimes it was simply going to the mall to get pizza
at Pavones. Or going to Friendly's for ice cream. However when we
started going for actual meals, we went to places such as Carmellas on
Ceil Drive near Bridge Street and Bennigans on Erie Boulevard. A lot
of the cool kids went to
The
Eggplant, which was open late in the strip mall with the TCBY. My
crowd never really went there, but I did go to their new location by
the old Chimney's Video store on Bridge Street.

The construction crew has made it this far down the page.From lego.com's 404 page.

Other trips

cousin Richard C's graduation from Cornell
cousin Richard C's wedding
cousin Elizabeth C's wedding
cousin Van C's wedding
cousin Jonathan C's wedding (while I was in Boston?)
other wedding (Don Duffy relative?) in boston (reading V book at reception)
1st wedding in Dubois
cousin 2x wedding in one weekend in Dubois
family trip to Ottawa during ice festival
family trip to Toronto to see Phantom of the Opera at the Pantages
church trip to Toronto, got my first Roots sweatshirt.
trip to Prince Edward Island.
stopped in Halifax where we sailed on the Blue Nose II, during which there was a wedding and all of us received cake!
stopped in St John, New Brunswick to see family. home of the Fundy Bay tides and reversing waterfall. got my thumb slammed in car door after viewing rapids. ouch.
family trip to Quebec
epcot, freshmen year winter break?
family trips to Madrid (twice I believe)
went to Segovia to see the aqueduct which was on the cover my middle school spanish book
went to El Corte Ingles, also learned about in spanish class
went to to new years eve in Plaza Mayor of Madrid, also read about in Spanish class
once skiing at Kissing Bridge
when visting Aunt Martha and Uncle Eddie in Boston, NY.